The Caples Awards’ Patrick Collister and Duncan Gray: Carrying on. FREE.

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The Caples Awards’ Patrick Collister and Duncan Gray: Carrying on. FREE.

The Caples Awards have announced today that the 2020 awards show will be free to enter. The awards will still go ahead virtually in May this year. Here, custodians of The Caples Awards Patrick Collister and Duncan Gray explain why their going ahead with this year’s Awards…

 

We are going ahead with The Caples Awards 2020.
But we’re making it a FREE TO ENTER competition.

While many agencies have frozen everything they possibly can, including their awards budgets, we want to offer a tiny bit of human warmth.

(Our own business has icicles hanging from it but we’re feeling positive about the future. The dark days will lighten up. Yay!)

We’re going ahead because:

1. We’d hate people to look back and see a black hole where creativity in 2019-20 should have been. We want our Book of the Show 2020 to be as crammed with great work as any year.

2. We have assembled a team of fantastic judges from around the world, who are keen to meet up and talk about the wonderful world of ideas, even if it’s in Zoom.

3. You may want to show us some love next year and enter everything you can think of (when we’ll be charging entry fees again).

Respect

Some creative people won’t want to submit to The Caples, because even great advertising looks pretty trivial when there are people fighting for their lives.

We respect that position. Arriving at ours has not been easy.

It’s defiance, really. We want to keep up some semblance of normality in the hope that we can all recover from the ravages of Coronavirus sooner rather than later.

There’s fear too.
Can the business survive till next year?
(Yes, probably.)
Will we be able to cope this year if we get a massive number of entries? 
(Yes, definitely.)
What else would we do in April?
(Drive each other nuts.)

We say that The Caples is an awards show run by creative people for creative people.

We want to demonstrate that we mean it.

An awards show you can enter if you don’t enter awards shows

Maybe this is an opportunity for small agencies, who have been intimidated by the costs of awards to see how they measure up against the big players?

Maybe it’s an opportunity for the big players to show us exactly why they are the big players?

Maybe it’s a time ‘unfashionable’ work can become fashionable again? On the jury there are creative directors who know how difficult it is to write a brilliant piece of direct mail. Or put together an email campaign. Or a series of ads for digital display.

If it’s ingenious, if it’s crafted, let us see it please.

Please support The Caples Awards with your work. In so doing we hope you will feel you are also supporting your peers, our industry, creativity itself.

Entries are open until May 1st 2020 and companies can enter work here. All work submitted should have been published or broadcast between September 1st 2018 and the competition closing date of May 1st 2020.

Judges from around the world will judge the work virtually on 11th and 12th May. Award winners will be announced on 13th May. Winners will receive a trophy and be featured in the book of the show (sponsored by Xerox) which will be made available for download digitally.