Who Decides What Great Experiential Work Looks Like in Canada?
Canadian Ad Insider and PR In Canada are opening the judging panel — and the sponsor roster — for the Event & Experiential Marketing Awards. Here's how to put your hand up.
Every year, Canadian brands spend real money putting people in a room, on a street corner, or in a line-up around the block. Pop-ups, brand houses, sponsorship activations, sampling programs, conferences, festival footprints, retail theatre. Work that only exists if someone shows up.
And every year, most of that work gets judged as a subcategory inside a general creative show — scored against a film spot by people who have never had to build something that survives rain, a permit office, and a Saturday crowd.
That's the gap the Event & Experiential Marketing Awards exist to close. One program, judged by people who actually do this work, evaluating it on the terms it's built on: the idea, the execution under real-world constraints, and what it did for the brand after everyone went home.
We're now recruiting the people who'll do that judging.
The call for judges
We're building a panel of judges for the inaugural program. We want a room that argues well — which means it can't be all agency, all brand, or all Toronto.
Who we're looking for:
- Brand-side marketers who commission and pay for experiential work, and who have to defend the spend internally
- Agency and production leads — experiential, event, sponsorship, XM, live production — who know what a deck promises versus what a build delivers
- Sponsorship and partnership marketers from properties, teams, festivals, and venues
- Measurement and strategy people who can tell the difference between a big crowd and a business result
- Voices from outside Toronto and Montreal. Western and Atlantic Canada, and francophone work, are consistently under-judged in this industry. We want to fix that here.
What it takes: roughly [2] hours across 3 months, done online, on your own schedule. You'll score entries in the categories that match your experience, and we'll ask you to write a short line of feedback on the work you score highly — that feedback becomes part of how we cover the winners.
What you get: you see the country's experiential work before anyone else does. Your name, title, and company sit on the judging panel page and run in every announcement. And you get a say in what this industry decides to reward — which, over time, is what it decides to make more of.
Conflicts: judges never score their own work, their agency's work, or a client's work. We assign categories around declared conflicts before scoring opens.
Apply here: JUDGING — applications close Sept 18.
The call for sponsors
This program is being built to be worth attaching a brand to, not just a logo placement.
Sponsors get in front of the buy-side and sell-side of Canadian experiential at the exact moment they're evaluating each other's work — through the awards site, the Canadian Ad Insider and PR In Canada newsletter, and the coverage that runs on every entry deadline, shortlist, and winner announcement.
Available now:
- Presenting partner — one only, top billing across the program, the site, the newsletter, and the winners' coverage
- Category sponsorship — own a category outright, with your name on it in every mention of that award, from shortlist to winner
- Judging panel partner — supporting the panel itself, including the judges' feedback that runs alongside winning work
- Winners' coverage partner — presence on the profiles and interviews we publish with each winner after the program closes
If you sell into experiential — production, staffing, fabrication, measurement, ticketing, venues, technology, insurance — this is a room of buyers, in one place, paying attention.
Packages and pricing: SPONSOR. We're keeping the roster small on purpose.
