Pictured: Cossette took top honours at the 2016 Agency of the Year awards.

It may be the season for spring cleaning and cherry blossoms, but in awards land, November isn’t so far away. That’s when we’ll be handing out our Agency of the Year awards at our annual gala, and it’s time to start preparing submissions.

Our pre-submission period has opened, and any agencies interested in competing should send us a list of campaigns they plan to enter before May 15. Once those campaigns have been approved, the case study submission period will follow in July. You can find more detailed information about submissions and judging here.

In addition to Agency of the Year, Digital Agency of the Year, Media Agency of the Year and PR Agency of the Year, we’ve added a new Design category for 2017.

Before May 15, please submit ONLY the names of the five (Agency of the Year) and/or three (Media, Digital, PR or Design Agency of the Year) campaigns you plan to enter. Please include the name of the client, the name of the campaign, and the dates when it was in market. You can send your list to Mark Burgess at mburgess@brunico.com.

The work must have appeared (or will appear) in the 12-month period from June 2016 to June 2017 (for Design, it’s a two-year period from June 2015 to June 2017). The campaigns have to be for five/three (dependant on the category) different brands, they cannot include self-promotional work and must be Canadian (if it’s a global campaign created here, it must have appeared in this market).

As with Agency of the Year and Digital Agency of the year, there is a no double-dipping policy for Design Agency of the Year: agencies must submit unique campaigns for each competition. For example, an agency can’t enter the same work for a CPG brand in Agency of the Year and Design AOY, even if it just includes design-driven creative (like a poster or website) that was a part of the overall campaign also entered into AOY.

The entry fee is $500, payable when the cases are uploaded (this is a cost per agency for each award category, not per case. So if an agency is entering both AOY and DAOY, the total cost will be $1,000).

To read about last year’s winners and for more extensive entry details, click here.