Agency of the Year winners' words: Preparing a winning entry

The deadline for 2017 Agency of the Year entries is 29 September. Please visit aoyawards.com for complete information and entry kit.

We asked some of last year's winners...

What was your strategy for preparing your entry?

Ronald Barreiro
Managing partner and general manager     
Dentsu Jayme Syfu
2016 Philippines Creative Agency of the Year - Gold

It's all about telling a story of our agency's culture and way of working. Everything else naturally follows.

Anish Daryani
CEO
Phibious Group
2016 Indonesia Independent Agency of the Year - Gold

We only had one clear strategy—being honest and humble about our achievements. We articulated our case study to highlight our true character and DNA, and what we needed to do differently to help us grow our business and do great work.

Anna Chua-Norbert
Talent director
DDB Group Philippines
2016 Southeast Asia Talent Management Person/Team of the Year - Gold

As soon as we submitted the year’s AOY entry, we start preparing for the following year. Our activities are guided by our employee survey and leadership mandate. We collate and document all our engagements, activities, people recognition, everything. It is a full year’s worth of work, which pays off when our people are happy, proud and are thriving here, it shows in their work output, their health and product, our clients rewarding the teams more business, improving our profit. 

 

And when we got the award, man, we were over the moon, it was all over social media instantly, and every employee shared the post, because they are part of our success. We exist and succeed because of them. Winning was the best feeling ever.

Casey Loh
Executive creative director
GOVT Kuala Lumpur (now The Clan)
2016 Malaysia Independent Agency of the Year - Gold

We took the time to really study the requirements of entry and looked deep within our organisation and methods at work before committing anything to text. It's a self-reflecting exercise that needs to be conducted honestly, carefully, and methodically according to the entry questions.

Amir Hamzah
Associate planning director
Havas Media Indonesia
2016 Southeast Asia Channel/Engagement Planner of the Year - Gold

When you do your work in systematics, it's easy to write the entry. It’s like building a story: you know the background, the insight and thinking process, and the strategy to guide the implementation—in this case, writing the entry.