Forgetting Boxes, Chasing Legacy

As we edge closer towards this year's submissions deadline (5th September 2024), approaching what we hope to be our most incredible year yet, I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought to how we got here and the things that make the Immortals what it is. 

Call me biased, but I believe in my bones (or skull) that what we do and how we do it is one of the best possible ways to celebrate creativity and craft. There. I said it. Big claims I know, but bear with me. 

How We Got Here

Seven years ago we sat down with a blank page trying to figure out what we wanted this to look like. What was the best way to judge work? We started looking around at what other shows did. Many are very, very similar. But most of them, whether they’re global, regional or local, are set up in a way that largely categorises work that comes in. You get categories by medium – that’s things like film, print, digital etc. Then you have categories by craft – ‘best colour’, ‘best direction’, ‘best edit’ and so on. On top of that you have product categories – in there you have ‘best automotive’, ‘best food and beverage’. You get the idea. 

We knew there were tons of ways to categorise, so the question was, ‘what should we do?’ 

So, we kicked off with three, simple principles. The awards would be:

1. Free to enter 

2. Easy to enter

3. Hard to win
   
   

The Immortal Standard

The Collins Dictionary defines it like this:

Hefty, right? But it uncomplicated things. In this industry, jurors are often asked something like this: “Does X work achieve X, Y and Z within the billboard category?” So rather than asking jurors to judge based on numbers, qualifiers, tick-boxes, instructions and criteria, we ask them one overarching question: “Is this work Immortal?” We’re essentially tasking them to predict the future. And the guidance we give them is pared back. We’ll ask, “What work do you think you’re going to be showing your creative teams, not just in a year or two, but in 10, 15, 20 years time? What is the work that left an indelible mark on the industry?” We tell them “You’re looking for incredible ideas, exceptionally executed.” They’re hunting for beyond best-in-class advertising. There’s something pretty special that begins to happen when you ask people to judge this way. 

Freedom Breeds Focus 

Every year our jury gets stronger. These are rooms of people who have usually been accustomed to judging quite rigidly in categories. So when it comes to us removing barriers and eliminating hoops to jump through, it can initially feel a little daunting; confusing, even. But that’s where the magic happens. Take people out of boxes and what you end up with is every shape you could imagine, in every size possible. It enables free thinking, and pure-form, responsive, reactive, critical analysis. 

Adding a bunch of categories would be more of a hindrance to our ambitions as a whole. The Immortals to us are an annual celebration of the very best work in the advertising industry, and it’s as simple as that. 

It’s for this reason that we don’t actually have a set number of awards either; there isn’t any quota. Our juries are given the trust and rein to do… pretty much as they please. If they decided so, they could award nothing at the end of the year. Or, they could award everything. Hypothetically speaking, our juries could give all of our entries a path to the next round, or in theory they could say “there’s nothing good enough this year” – that’d be a challenging showcase tour. I can remember one year where a particular jury gave only one piece of work ‘finalist’ status. This refusal to limit, or be tied to a number or percentage, is quite liberating for our juries. At every corner, it comes back to the work and the work alone. 

You’d imagine this level of freedom would become a free for all. But it’s quite the opposite. Last year, the jurors decided that just three pieces of work were worthy of the title ‘Immortal’. It seems that the wider the lens, the more laser focused the result. Every year, we see so much truly stunning work, particularly film. There are floods of beautiful, incredible, and essentially flawless films. If we were judging on craft alone, many would go home with arms filled with skulls. But that’s the thing. We’re asking a much bigger question. We want to know if it has pushed advertising into a different era, a new sphere; a higher level. 

We’re also set up in a way where no-one can ‘play the game’. The purposeful looseness coupled with the lack of categories and criteria, means that you can’t just tick box your way to winning by following a formula. 

In seven years, we’ve gone from having a single global jury on a single day, judging a single body of work, to last year having 17 jury days; 10 countries, six regions and a global day. What began with 15 jurors will be expected to reach over 150 this year. The growth is fantastic. But with that growth we are faced with recurring questions. Will we implement categories? Will we begin judging by criteria? 

I’m told to never say never and all that. But in the end, it’s not about fitting in – it’s about standing the test of time.