We’re delighted to say that we had a record number of entries to the PRmoment Awards in 2018. Thank you so much to all those who have taken the time to enter. We know it’s a tough process to go through and appreciate that it takes time and effort to put a decent entry together.

In terms of what happens next, we’re always keen to take the mystery out of the process, so here is an outline of what the judges are up to.

Our jury of nearly 100 expert judges have been divided into 25 panels across 4 judging streams. It’s important that no judge is on a panel that includes any of their own work and we also ensure that the panels include a mix of in-house and agency expertise. Needless to say each panel also needs to have people with experience within the area of the work that they are judging. We had 870 entries this year so you can imagine this is quite a complicated process.

Each judge is part of one panel and they have all been sent up to 35 award entries to score against the specific criteria.

In each category the top 6/7 entries will make the shortlists for the awards. The judges for each panel will then meet up and decide the winning entry from the shortlist.

The marks for each entry from the pre-scoring inform and lead the discussion but it is not the case that the winning entry is always the one with the highest score. That said, if an entry is a clear “winner” based on the pre-scoring there would need to be a very good reason given by the judges as to why it did not win.

The reality is that, most of the time, the pre-scoring scores are very close; hence the judges deliberations can become lengthy discussions.

Each panel is chaired by an experienced practitioner to ensure that the panel retains a balance and it’s not the case that the loudest judge is able to push their opinion too strongly.  Worth noting that no-one from PRmoment is a judge, we would regard this as a potential conflict of interest.

The PRmoment Awards Shortlist will be announced on February 9th. The PRmoment Awards London are on 22nd March and the Manchester Awards are on 26th April.

Further information is available here about the award evenings.

We expect over 1000 people to attend the PRmoment Awards 2018 and there are a couple of sponsorship opportunities remaining, so do get in touch if you’d like to hear more.