The first phase of the 2020 Agency of the Year awards program is a week away from coming to a close. The final day to express your agency’s intent to enter the competition is this Friday, June 26.

Any agencies interested in competing this year can submit their list of campaigns they plan to enter submit in July and August, when the official submission period begins.

To state their intent to enter, agencies need to fill out this form before Friday.

In it, they will submit the (1) name of the client, (2) the name of the campaign, and (3) the dates when the campaign was in market, for the four (for Agency of the Year) and/or three (Media, Digital, PR, Design or Small Agency of the Year) cases they plan to submit in June.

This year, there are a couple of changes to the program in light of business pressures the pandemic has placed on the industry.

To ease entry prep for the Agency and Media categories, the former only requires four cases (instead of five), while the latter will no longer submit case videos – media agencies will only be asked to submit written cases.

Also, the in-market period for campaigns an agency wishes to submit has been extended to the end of July 2020.

As always, the work must have appeared (or will appear) in the 12-month period from June 2019 to June 2020. All of the campaigns have to be for different brands, cannot include self-promotional work and must be Canadian (if it’s a global campaign created here, it must have appeared in this market).

What also remains is our strict no double-dipping policy: agencies must submit unique campaigns for each competition. For example, an agency can’t enter the same work for a specific 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 ($750) is payable when the cases are uploaded and is a cost per agency for each award category, not per case.

Once an agency’s campaigns have been vetted and approved by the editorial team, they will be invited to submit their written case studies and visual assets for our expert judges to review.

The submission period will take place between June 29 and Aug. 14.

Following this phase, the cases in each category will be judged by senior Canadian agency executives and marketers to determine a shortlist of agencies, which will be announced later in the summer. The Gold, Silver and Bronze winners for each competition will be revealed this fall, and winning portfolios will once again be published in strategy‘s end-of-year magazine, continuing our long-held tradition.

To read about last year’s winners and for more extensive entry details, visit the Agency of the Year website.