Matthew Leopold
ESA Awards Chair of Judges
Every year I read entries for work that deserved to win and didn’t. The sponsorship itself was solid, the strategy made sense and the results delivered against the objectives. But the awards entry let it down.
We’ve spent years at the ESA Awards working to ensure that this doesn’t happen. Yet, it happens more often than you’d think and we’d like. Sure, every now and then, there is a really weak entry. But that is thankfully rare. The biggest issue is how the sponsorship award entry is written.
We run a strict points-based marking scheme. Judges will only mark what they can see or read on the entry. This ensures parity between big sponsorships and small sponsorships across Europe. The mark scheme is no secret – you can read it for yourself on the ESA website.
Most of the marks lost each year come from the same handful of avoidable mistakes. None of them needs a bigger budget or a better campaign. Here are the five mistakes I see most often and my views on how to avoid each one.
1. Answering the question you want to answer
This is the most common mistake by a distance. People understandably write about the work that made them proudest rather than answering the question the judges are actually posing.
I promise the judges aren’t making it up as they go along. They’re working through a mark scheme. If your evidence isn’t where they expect to find it, you force them to join the dots. Ignore the guidance and you are leaving marks on the table.
Think of your entry less as a story and more as a well-argued case structured around the criteria. Don’t fall into the trap of contributing material that is interesting but will not get you marks. Every sentence should add value.
2. Falling in love with the activation
You can feel the energy in the entries. Most people are desperate to write about the exciting bit of their sponsorship: the celebrity, the social campaign, the event…
The problem is that judges aren’t scoring excitement. Planning accounts for 30 of the 100 available marks. Planning begins with a clearly defined business problem.
- What business challenge were you trying to solve?
- Why was sponsorship the right answer?
- Why this particular partner or asset instead of another?
Without that context, even the cleverest execution can feel like an expensive answer to the wrong question.
3. Assuming everyone knows your brand
Send letters of complaint to the ESA office, but here is a home truth. Nobody cares about your brand as much as you do.
Nor should they.
ESA judges come from across Europe. They work in different markets, different countries and have different experiences. As such, we insist that they assess only what appears in front of them. They probably don’t know your market or your competitors. They certainly won’t award marks for information you neglected to include.
However well-known your brand is at home, explain your brand, your reasoning and why you chose this specific partnership. Explain as if you were introducing it for the first time. What feels obvious to you is new information for our judges.
4. Confusing attention with success
This is my personal bugbear. Marketing has collected quite a few shiny metrics over the years. The number of entries that equate views, likes, impressions, attendance and AVE against impact is shocking.
Some of these metrics are useful and illustrate performance – but none of them proves business impact.
The Results section is worth 30 marks. Judges are looking for evidence that you achieved the objectives you originally set, generated commercial value and learned something worth carrying forward. Nothing that rewards reach for its own sake.
Better still, tell them what didn’t work. That might sound counter-intuitive, but experienced judges trust honest reflection far more than unachievable perfection. Every campaign leaves a few bruises. Pretending yours didn’t makes the story less believable.
5. Ignoring the mark scheme
This one always surprises me. Brands spend big money on a sponsorship. They invest months planning it and delivering it. Yet they spend surprisingly little time reading the document that explains how that sponsorship will be judged.
The mark scheme isn’t hidden away. It’s public.
Read it. Then read it again.
Then use it as the structure for your entire entry. Build your entry around the criteria from the beginning. It sounds obvious. It is obvious! Which is probably exactly why so many people overlook it.
The 2027 ESA Awards is now open.
If you believe your work deserves recognition, give the entry the same attention you gave the sponsorship itself.
Your judges will notice and your score is likely to reflect it.
- Entry for the 2027 ESA Awards is open until 16 October, with an early-bird entry deadline of 25 September. Enter now.
