This Monday might have been an unremarkable day for most of you reading this, but for myself in particular, and I think everyone at Mobile Marketing Towers, it was a special day in the calendar: the day we launched the call for entries for the 2016 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards.

The process of judging the Awards is such a mammoth one – as chair of the Judging Panel I have always felt duty bound to look at every last one – that I always approach the process with a certain sense of trepidation. And then you get stuck in and wonder what you were worried about. Yes, the task takes up a lot of time, but it’s time well spent, when you consider that it put you in front of some of the best and most effective mobile marketing campaigns and platforms out there.

What’s become increasingly evident in recent years is what many industry experts have been saying needed to happen – that mobile stopped being siloed and treated as an integral part of a bigger whole. And so we saw last year’s Grand Prix Winner, Mindshare’s Feel Wimbledon campaign for Jaguar, leveraging the power of mobile tech, but also having so much more up its sleeve in the way of content marketing, using amplification via social channels and digital outdoor to bring the campaign to masses.

In the case of John Lewis and Virgin Holidays, mobile was deployed successfully in store in combination with affordable Cardboard Virtual Reality headsets, to bring the start of a Christmas TV campaign, and a beautiful holiday destination respectively, to virtual life.

What these and many of the other winning campaigns shared was a willingness to think big, combined with a good, original idea, well executed, and of course, great results, as any campaign that picks up an award with effectiveness at its core should do.

As we embark on this year’s Awards Program, who knows what we’ll see in the way of entries coming in over the next couple of months. It’s the beauty of any Awards Program of course, that the best stuff will take you totally by surprise and make you rethink the way you look at something. When you add mobile tech into the mix – Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and the more mundane stuff such as proximity and some of the native capabilities built into the modern smartphone like the camera and the accelerometer – it’s no surprise that you see some truly wonderful stuff. Not to mention the odd entry that must have seemed like a good idea to someone at the time, but which fell down on that most basic of criteria – adding something of value, utility or entertainment to the lives of the people it was aimed at.

Whatever drops through our digital letterbox in the weeks to come, me and my fellow judges – including several new ones from both brand- and vendor-side who have joined the Judging Panel this year, will have a great time assessing and scoring them.

To everyone working on their entries, the best of luck. To those who are not sure whether they have anything capable of winning, check out last year’s winners here and see if you can identify any common themes. Just one last piece of advice: as hinted at earlier, we can’t give out Awards based on effectiveness without evidence of, er, effectiveness. So if the figures to support your entry are not for public consumption, do all you can to get permission to let the judges see them, or you’ll be putting yourself at a disadvantage before you start.

You can get the full SP on this year’s Awards Program here. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you at the Awards Ceremony in November.