Award Submission Writing Editing and Proofreading Services

Awards are judged by busy practitioners reading forty entries in an evening, scoring against published criteria, most of which the entries do not address. The work described is frequently excellent. The entry is written as a story about how brilliant the campaign was, the judge scores it against criteria about objectives, insight, execution and results, and an inferior piece of work with a disciplined entry beats it. Awards are won on entry-writing far more often than the industry admits.

We edit what agencies, in-house teams and entrants across sectors produce — award entries across marketing, business, professional and industry schemes, entry summaries and headline statements, objectives and challenge sections, strategy and insight sections, execution and creative rationale, results and evidence sections, judge-facing supporting documents, video and presentation scripts for shortlisted entries, client and third-party endorsement statements, entry planning and scheme selection documentation, and post-award publicity material. Our editors work to the word limits and the published criteria rather than to the story the entrant wants to tell.

Writing to the criteria is the whole discipline, and it is unnatural. An entrant knows the campaign chronologically and wants to narrate it; the judge has a scoresheet with four weighted sections and no way to award marks for a good story told in the wrong box. We restructure entries so each section answers the criterion it sits under and stops, so the highest-weighted section gets the most words rather than the most interesting one, and so the objectives stated at the start are the ones the results section reports against — because the commonest scoring failure is an entry that sets three objectives and reports on a different metric that happened to be impressive. We make results carry their baseline, their period and their attribution honestly, since judges are practitioners who know what a 400% increase from a low base means; and we cut the adjectives, because an entry that says the work was groundbreaking is spending words a judge does not score on, in a section where the evidence would have earned marks.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished results, client information and entries before submission. We are editors rather than judges or awards consultants, and we offer no view on the merits of any work, the likelihood of success, or scheme rules. What we can do is make the entry answer what is being scored, within the limits set.