THE EFFIE AWARDS KICK OFF, ADD A NEW CATEGORY FOR B2B AND REVISE THE RULES FOR DIGITAL ENTRIES - ScreenVoice.cz

The Effie Awards Czech Republic, a competition recognising effective marketing communication, is entering its 29th year. This year, the Association of Communication Agencies (AKA) is introducing a new category for B2B products and services, whilst also refining the criteria for evaluating digital campaigns.

Entries for this year’s Effie advertising effectiveness competition opened on 30 June. The organising Association of Communication Agencies (AKA) is building on last year’s edition, which saw 117 campaigns entered and 45 entries awarded by the jury.

The most significant new development is the introduction of the B2B Products and Services category. This is intended for campaigns targeting corporate clients and specialist audiences. It includes, for example, technological solutions, software, logistics or energy services, consultancy, and financial products for businesses. The judging will focus primarily on the ability of the communication to engage decision-makers and contribute to the brand’s commercial or reputational outcomes.

The changes also affect the Digital Marketing and Social Media category. AKA has amended its rules to better distinguish between campaigns based on a standalone digital strategy and those where digital plays only a supporting role within a broader integrated communications strategy.

Entries will need to demonstrate their own digital strategy, a standalone digital solution, and provide evidence of the contribution made by the digital component of the campaign. The Digital jury will focus, for example, on metrics such as CPA, ROAS, PNO or conversion rates, or on methods for measuring the incremental or causal impact of campaigns.

“We want to compare digital campaigns more accurately, not just on the basis of whether they were part of a large-scale integrated communication campaign. It is important that the entry clearly shows what was genuinely digital about the solution, what its own strategy was, and what impact the digital element had,” said representatives of the digital jury, Ondřej Danda from Peppermint Digital and Martin Špaček from Marketup.

SIMAR remains the competition’s expert partner and will conduct a preliminary research phase focused on verifying data handling, the metrics used and the documented results.

The main partners for this year’s edition are Google, Seznam.cz, Teamogy, Active and FTV Prima. Seznam.cz has become the partner for the Digital Marketing and Social Media category.

The organisers will announce the composition of the main, PR and digital juries during July. As was the case last year, the main jury will be chaired by Petra Jankovičová.

The competition finalists will be announced on 10 November during the Forum Media conference. The awards ceremony for the Effie Awards Czech Republic 2026 will take place on 25 November. The evening will also feature special awards for the best use ofYouTube, radio and video formats.

Another new feature of this year’s edition is the Early Birds discount period for entries , which runs until 20 July.

“For us, the Effies are not just an awards evening and a ceremony. We want to use them to build a platform that helps foster debate on the effectiveness of marketing communication. That is one of the reasons why, this year, we have expanded the programme of workshops for entrants, which were designed to give a clearer idea of what it actually means to demonstrate a campaign’s effectiveness,” says Radana Čechová, director of AKA.