XII International marketing and advertising festival White Square – one of the largest creative festivals of communication industry on the territory of Europe – announced the call for entries. Festival is annually attended by representatives of over 30 countries of the world, has more than 1000 entries participating in its contests and 700 delegates in educational program. White Square will traditionally open international season of creativity on April 15-17 in Minsk.
White Square 2020 will keep its three-day format with various business and educational program and well-known communication experts from all around the world as headliners, as well as exciting parties of advertisers from different countries.
Contest program of the festival has preserved its previous balance of contests and nominations. However, it includes a number of updates corresponding to current industrial trends, relevant requests of global communications, taking into account the tendencies of Eastern European market.
Entries can still be submitted into seven categories: Creativity, Branding, Marketing, Creative Effectiveness, Digital, Media, Change for Good – contest of creative socially-oriented projects which this year gained a new sounding following increasing actualization of social and environmental problems going on worldwide.
Taking into consideration dynamic transformation of communications market and growing amount of information, when it is getting increasingly difficult to attract consumer’s attention, a number of nominations of the festival put more emphasis on the use of innovative technologies in online advertising, as well as innovative original approaches to traditional types of advertising. Since this year, next to already existing Innovations contest, White Square launched nominations Innovation in Print, Innovation in Radio & Audio, Innovation in Outdoor. Digital contest was added with such nominations as Advanced Learning Technologies, Activation by location / Voice activation, New realities / 360º, Native advertising.
Due to growing boom of social media several contests like Integrated, PR, Digital campaigns have included special Social & Influencer nominations; Design, Mobile and Creative Data contests were added with Social Media Design, Social Content and Social Data & Insight nominations.
In according to international trends Marketing and Media categories will have more concrete criteria of evaluation of entries containing particular percentage for creativity, execution and results.
In Branding category, in particular in Communication Design contest, nominations have been unified and grouped according to the purposes of design projects. For the first time this year, Rebrand / Refresh of an existing Brand, Promotional Printed Materials, Promotional Item Design nominations were launched, with a number of previous years narrow nominations inclusive.
Following global trends, White Square nominations were added with Creative Strategy nomination, which became part of Integrated contest and aims to demonstrate the contribution of innovative creative strategic planning into business development, and Design-Driven Effectiveness nomination, which became part of Communication Design contest and aims to show measurable, tangible results of design and branding projects.
A number of earlier existing contests and nominations got more modern sounding, retaining their previous contents in terms of entries eligible to participate: Brand Experience & Activation (formerly Promo & Activation), Breakthrough on a Budget (formerly Low budget project) etc.
Entries are being accepted online. First, Early Bird period with more profitable fees will be continued till January 31.
Entries will be evaluated by six categories of international jury – over 60 recognized industrial experts from 25 countries, holding a wide experience of judging and hundreds of prestigious awards, including over 300 Cannes Lions. Total jury cast is being formed and will be announced in January. For the moment participation in White Square 2020 jury have been confirmed by Vidya Manmohan, GREY UAE; Mischa Schreuder, Publicis, The Netherlands; Edson Athayde, FCB Lisboa, Portugal; Hanna Stenwall, Nord DDB, Sweden; Stephanie Lang, Ogilvy & Mather, Switzerland; Kenn Van Lijsebeth, TBWA \ Brussels, Belgium; Ioana Zamfir, MRM//Mccann Romania; Julia Dovlatova, Geometry Prague, Czech Republic; Davide Boscacci, Publicis Italy and others.
To make long story short, it’s time to upload your entries! Follow the news in White Square’s social media!