This year, the IAB MIXX Awards have set themselves on a new path—emphasizing user experience and even user enchantment. We took a step back, with the help of many of the members of our prestigious jury, and rethought the categories so they reflect this shift that is taking place throughout the digital media industry. We created new ways to celebrate those advertising experiences that are so captivating, entertaining, or helpful they inspire users to action. In many cases, that reciprocity is driven by content, services, and marketing-driven products that make people’s lives both easier and more enjoyable.
For this is the future of the industry. The internet has always been powered by users—it’s the first media through which consumers could express themselves, choose the exact content they want from an infinite supply, and improve their quality of life through company-built and user-built advancements.
Just as the internet is the media of the user, digital marketing is the advertising of the user. Best-in-class interactive advertising sparks reciprocal and meaningful relationships with consumers, driven by the value that the advertising itself provides, whether that’s through entertainment, the creation of a community, or an app that saves them time or money.
To acknowledge and honor this new imperative—user enchantment—we’ve created new award categories that emphasize it and the resulting reciprocity. These categories honor the advertising that consumers have chosen to respond to.
We begin with categories that celebrate two-way relationships built by marrying the digital and physical worlds.
- Internet of Things: Few experiences are as enchanting as getting a taste of the most cutting-edge technology. When brands successfully leverage, or even create, connected physical devices or objects, they fascinate audiences instantaneously, opening the door for the true, often data-driven, exchange of content or services.
- Live Experience Integration: When a brand is successfully and powerfully aligned with a live event through interactivity, it can add enchantment to the event itself and can even carry the vibrant live experience far beyond the space, building community beyond ticketed seats and parking lots.
- Digital to Destination: Perhaps there is no greater manifestation of a two-way relationship than digital advertising that inspires consumers to travel to a physical location like a retail store, restaurant, or movie theater. This category celebrates advertising that directly triggers embarking on this journey.
- Physical-Digital Integration: There is an abundance of ways the digital and physical worlds can be connected, and innovations in this area are happening all of the time. This is the category for brand experiences that marry the physical and digital arenas in ways not limited to IoT, Live Experience Integration, and driving users to become brick-and-mortar customers.
We have also included new categories honoring relationship building itself. Most, if not all, campaigns today have a clear target audience and a social aspect, but campaigns in these categories excel because of the effectiveness of the way that these deep connections are made.
- Cracking the Code: A campaign that resonates across demographics and across the globe is an outstanding achievement, but in the digital world where niche communities abound and targeting is the norm, creating an authentic brand experience that creates reciprocity with a specific audience such as millennials, women, minorities, is a triumph deeply reflective of the ethos of digital itself.
- Social – Community Building: Brands that effectively use social platforms to build or foster a community, create ongoing hives of activity by consistently creating enough value for a target group of users that they are inspired to share and respond within this community over and over again.
- Social – Influencer Marketing: Brand plus celebrity is timeless equation for marketing success. But in the social sphere, it’s not as easy as hiring a movie-star spokesperson to give a canned performance. Effectively inspiring users to action online requires a partnership with just the right social influencer, social ambassador, or celebrity, and it necessitates that the “influencer” can interact meaningfully enough with the people that they respond in droves.
- Social – Real-Time Engagement: This category honors brands that push themselves to the surface in the midst and the context of a zeitgeist. Current events and cultural moments provide brands with time-sensitive moments to build two-way relationships with their audiences, but only if they can rise above the endless chatter and do so in a positive light—it’s a challenging task deserving of its own recognition.
Since their inception the IAB MIXX Awards have celebrated both great creative and powerful effectiveness. This year, the awards bring the two together to celebrate creativity in relationship building.
Successful relationships of any kind demand that both sides feel like they’re winning. For brands, this means gaining awareness, sales, and even better, loyal customers. For users, this means experiencing enchantment through captivating entertainment, life-altering convenience, meaningful financial savings, and the richness of community. This is the type of great work our winners build out of a brief and a blank page. This is the incredible talent that IAB will honor this September.