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Reaching and influencing customers in the B2B space presents unique competitive challenges. What strategy informed your brand's approach to gain attention and successfully build B2B relationships?

Finding ways for brands to resonate across the decision-making journey is challenging within strict regulatory environments. The opportunity to connect with target audiences in categories like pharma or cannabis calls for insightful regulatory navigation strategies. Explain how your strategic approach opened the door to creativity within constraints, and helped position your brand to stand out in a regulated category.

Strategies for changing minds and saving lives. Government, advocacy, social issues, fund and awareness-raising.

Budget will always be an issue, so as the challenger brand, what's your strategy to level the playing field? Tell us what your budget/resource challenges were and how you overcame them.

There are more touch points, but engagement is getting harder, so what's the plan for compelling and impactful ways to reach consumers?

Crafting unique, relevant, sticky brand content that engages consumers is one thing, keeping it up is the bigger challenge. What's the strategy to build audiences and develop content programs and platforms in a long-term, sustainable way?

Great planning leads to great work. This award allows teams to recognize planners who provided the spark that led to brilliant creative and big brand ideas. Must be entered by a brand, media partner or agency creative lead - not the planner.

The value of data (and a direct relationship with consumers) is a key brand priority. There are more ways and means to gather and deploy deeper data, but changing consumer behaviour and privacy concerns make it more challenging, so what's the plan for capturing and utilizing intel effectively?

Your brand has a formula that's been working and has been following it for years. So what's the plan for amping up the interest and evolving the strategy within the existing parameters? Tell us what the brand was doing before and what the new strategy is.

Like it sounds. A transformational disruption strategy.

From the ground up, a blueprint for going to market. From brand new products and services to line extensions and innovation, the segmentation, positioning and marketing strategy behind the launch plan.

As Canada grows ever more multicultural, brands need to evolve their strategy to be more inclusive. Explain how you leveraged cultural insights to develop a strategy that uniquely and effectively positions and connects your brand with multicultural consumers.

It's hard enough to reach a mass audience, how do you find a strategy to culturally connect with specific communities? From demos (millennials, LGBT, boomers) to geography (regional, rural, urban), effective niche market insights and targeting strategies.

To ferret out new insights you need to look at things differently. From analytic gymnastics to guerilla anthropology, what  novel research methodology fueled your planning process?

Optimizing spend and amping results is a core strategic focus. This award recognizes ROI-savvy strategic planning that leads to more efficient marcom outcomes. Explain how your strategy drove effectiveness against a primary goal, and prove the impact by showing a direct link between the strategy and the return. Must include an ROI or ROAS calculation; judges will expect to see a return on ad spend figure (the amount of revenue generated per $ spent)

Trust, earned media, a conduit to hard-to-engage audiences - no wonder brands want to tap the social power of sharing and influence. What's the strategy for doing so in an effective way?

It was broke. You fixed it! Time moved on so you found a whole new reason for being - a new positioning, a new channel, new targets and a new way to go to market.

The Jury will select the planning work that had most significant brand impact. A grand prix calibre strategy informs the way the brand goes to market in a significant ongoing way.