Abby Awards 2004: Entries close on January 27

The Advertising Club Bombay has announced that the last date for advertising agencies to send in entries for the 37th Abby Awards (Abby 2004) is Tuesday, January 27. "We have been receiving a flow of entries from all over, and the response has been very good. Now we have decided that we shall stop accepting entries after January 27," says MG ‘Ambi' Parameswaran, executive director, FCB-Ulka, and president of The Advertising Club Bombay. For those agencies that have still to send in their entries, he adds that entry forms are available with the Ad Club Secretariat, while the forms can also be downloaded from the Ad Club website. For the record, this year's Abby Awards are scheduled to be held in March. The exact date of the award ceremony will be announced shortly.

Interestingly, this year's Awards have undergone a "streamlining in categories". For instance, ‘Foods' has been delinked from ‘Beverages and Tobacco' and has become a category in its own right. Similarly, while in the past, ‘Toiletries' was clubbed with ‘Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Products', this time round, Toiletries has been placed alongside ‘Household care'. While ‘Health and Cosmetic care' constitute a different category. Past categories such as ‘Corporate Communication, Industrial Products, Services', ‘Financial Services' and ‘Rural Products & Services' have been done away with this time, while the ‘IT & Telecom' and ‘Retail Stores, Boutiques, Salons etc' categories have been merged with other categories.

"The objective here was to get rid of weak categories that did not attract too many entries by either taking those categories out of the list, or by grouping them under a different category," says Parameswaran. In all, this year's Awards have 20 categories, including Radio, Outdoor, New Interactive Media, Art Director of the Year, Copywriter of the Year, and Best Continuing Campaign of the Year and Campaign of the Year. A category notably missing this year is ‘Unpublished Work'.

One of the interesting aspects of the Abby Awards 2004 is the constitution of a new category - Brand India. According to the Ad Club Website, the idea behind this category is ‘to strengthen the Brand India theme that is increasingly gaining ground'. The objective, as set before agencies, is to create a piece of communication - it could be a single press ad, a single television film or a campaign - that showcases India to either an Indian or an international audience. The website adds that the work entered in this category will be judged by a separate panel of judges. While on the topic of judges and juries, the chairperson for this year's Awards Judging Committee is Bal Palekar (of Eureka Forbes). © 2004 agencyfaqs!