BCAMA MARKETER OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2026-2027
Campaign Eligibility
Eligible campaigns must have been substantially in market between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026. Campaigns that began before this period may also qualify if significant campaign activity and measurable results occurred during the eligibility period. At the time of submission, entrants must have sufficient results to demonstrate the campaign’s impact.
Entries must have a meaningful connection to British Columbia. A campaign is eligible where it meets at least one of the following criteria:
- The organization or client is based in B.C. or has a significant B.C. presence
- The campaign was led or substantially developed by a B.C.-based marketing team, agency or practitioner
- B.C. was a significant audience, market or community for the campaign
- A substantial portion of the campaign’s execution or impact took place in B.C.
The campaign does not need to be exclusively focused on B.C. and may have regional, national or international reach. The BCAMA reserves the right to determine eligibility where the connection to British Columbia is unclear.
Award Categories
- Brand Building Excellence
- Growth & Performance Marketing
- Integrated Marketing Campaign
- Purpose & Community Impact
- Creative Excellence
- Customer Experience & Engagement
- Small Budget, Big Impact
- Marketing Excellence at Scale
1. Brand Building Excellence
Build a Brand People Remember
Brand building is about more than creating awareness. It is about shaping how people see, understand, experience, and remember a brand.
Brand Building Excellence recognizes campaigns that successfully built, strengthened, repositioned or transformed a brand through strategic marketing. Whether launching something entirely new, redefining an established brand or changing perceptions in a meaningful way, this award celebrates marketing that creates lasting brand value.
What types of campaigns are eligible?
Examples include:
- New brand launches
- Rebrands and brand refreshes
- Brand repositioning
- Awareness and consideration campaigns
- Brand platform or identity launches
- Campaigns designed to change brand perception
- Initiatives that strengthen brand relevance with a new or existing audience
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should clearly articulate:
- The business or organizational challenge and the role the brand needed to play
- The audience and insight that informed the strategy
- The brand strategy and marketing approach
- How the campaign differentiated the brand or strengthened its position
- The creative idea and how it brought the brand strategy to life
- Evidence of brand impact and results
- How performance was measured and improved
Results may include measures such as awareness, consideration, preference, perception, engagement, market share, audience growth or other relevant brand indicators.
Judging focus: Strategic thinking, clarity of brand positioning, insight, creativity, execution and evidence of meaningful brand impact.
2. Growth & Performance Marketing
Marketing That Moves the Numbers
Great performance marketing connects insight, data and creativity to deliver measurable results.
Growth & Performance Marketing celebrates campaigns that drove meaningful business or organizational growth through strategic, measurable and data-informed marketing. From customer acquisition and lead generation to e-commerce and sales growth, this category recognizes marketing that can demonstrate a clear connection between strategy, execution and results.
What types of campaigns are eligible?
Examples include:
- Lead generation campaigns
- Customer acquisition
- Sales growth
- E-commerce campaigns
- Conversion optimization
- Digital performance campaigns
- Retargeting or lifecycle marketing
- Campaigns focused on revenue, pipeline or measurable growth
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should clearly articulate:
- The growth challenge or business objective
- The target audience and customer insight
- The strategy and role of data
- The channels, tactics and optimization approach used
- How performance was measured and improved
- The results achieved relative to the objectives and available resources
Where possible, include meaningful benchmarks, percentage changes, conversion rates, acquisition costs, revenue, ROI or other relevant performance measures.
Judging focus: Strategic clarity, effective use of data and insight, optimization, measurable outcomes, efficiency and overall business impact.
3. Integrated Marketing
One Idea. Many Channels. One Connected Experience.
The strongest integrated campaigns do more than appear in multiple places. They create a connected experience in which each channel plays a meaningful role in bringing the strategy and idea to life.
Integrated Marketing Campaign recognizes campaigns that effectively combine multiple channels to create a cohesive, compelling and consistent customer experience.
What types of campaigns are eligible?
Campaigns may incorporate any combination of channels, including:
- Digital and social
- Public relations
- Experiential and events
- Broadcast
- Out-of-home
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Email and CRM
- Partnerships
- Print or traditional media
There is no required number of channels. What matters is how effectively the channels work together.
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should explain:
- The campaign challenge and objectives
- The central insight and strategic idea
- Why the selected channels were appropriate for the audience
- The distinct role each channel played
- How the campaign maintained a cohesive idea and experience
- How the campaign evolved across channels, if applicable
- The results achieved
Judging focus: Strategic integration, channel selection, consistency and creativity of execution, customer experience and campaign results.
4. Purpose & Community Impact
Marketing That Makes a Difference
Marketing has the power to influence behaviour, bring communities together and create meaningful change.
Purpose & Community Impact celebrates campaigns that use marketing to create positive social, environmental or community impact. The award is open to organizations of all types whose campaigns demonstrate a meaningful connection between purpose, strategy and measurable impact.
Who can enter?
This category is open to:
- Non-profit organizations
- Charities
- Government organizations
- Corporations
- Agencies
- Other organizations delivering purpose-driven campaigns
What types of campaigns are eligible?
Examples include campaigns focused on:
- Social change
- Community engagement
- Environmental sustainability
- Public awareness
- Fundraising
- Behaviour change
- Inclusion and accessibility
- Community development
- Corporate purpose
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should clearly articulate:
- The issue, need or opportunity being addressed
- The community or audience affected
- The insight behind the campaign
- The role marketing played in creating change
- How authenticity and purpose informed the strategy
- The campaign execution and partnerships, where relevant
- Evidence of impact and results
Impact may be demonstrated through behavioural change, participation, awareness, fundraising, community engagement, reach or other meaningful measures.
Judging focus: Strategic integration, channel selection, consistency and creativity of execution, customer experience and campaign results.
5. Creative Excellence
Ideas That Make Marketing Matter
Creativity is most powerful when it does more than get attention—it changes behaviour, creates connection and makes the marketing more effective.
Creative Excellence recognizes exceptional creative thinking and execution that elevated a campaign and contributed to its success. This category celebrates the idea, the craft and the way creativity solved a marketing challenge.
What types of work are eligible?
Entries may demonstrate excellence in:
- Big ideas and concepts
- Storytelling
- Art direction and design
- Copywriting
- Brand expression
- Content
- Digital creative
- Experiential creative
- Integrated creative execution
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should explain:
- The marketing challenge that the creative needed to solve
- The insight that inspired the idea
- The creative idea and why it was distinctive
- How the idea was executed
- How the creative connected with the intended audience
- How creativity contributed to marketing effectiveness
- The results achieved
Strong creative execution should be supported by evidence that the work was not simply distinctive, but effective.
Judging focus: Originality, insight, idea strength, storytelling, craft, execution, relevance and contribution to campaign effectiveness.
6. Customer Experience & Engagement
Create Experiences People Want to Come Back to
Every interaction is an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with a customer, member, supporter or community.
Customer Experience & Engagement celebrates marketing that created exceptional experiences before, during or after a purchase or visit. This award recognizes campaigns and programs that used insight, personalization, community and meaningful engagement to deepen relationships and drive action.
What types of work are eligible?
Examples include:
- Customer journeys
- Loyalty programs
- CRM and lifecycle marketing
- Retention campaigns
- Community building
- Personalization
- Customer engagement programs
- Onboarding experiences
- Advocacy programs
- Post-purchase marketing
What should your submission demonstrate?
Entrants should outline:
- The customer challenge or opportunity
- The audience and customer insight
- The desired experience and business or organizational objective
- How the customer journey was designed or improved
- The role of data, technology, personalization or other tools
- How customers were engaged at meaningful touchpoints
- Evidence of improved experience, engagement or retention
Results might include retention, repeat purchase, loyalty, engagement, satisfaction, advocacy, customer lifetime value or other relevant measures.
Judging focus: Customer insight, quality of experience, relevance, innovation, engagement and measurable impact.
7. Small Budget, Big Impact
Big Thinking. Smart Spending. Meaningful Results.
Great marketing isn’t defined by the size of the budget. It is defined by what marketers accomplish with the resources available to them.
Small Budget, Big Impact celebrates campaigns that demonstrate exceptional resourcefulness, creativity and effectiveness on a limited budget. It recognizes marketers who found smart ways to overcome resource constraints and deliver results that exceeded expectations.
What types of work are eligible?
Campaigns must have a total campaign investment of less than $50,000.
The investment threshold should include the relevant costs associated with developing and delivering the campaign. Entrants should provide a clear explanation of what was included in the reported investment.
The category is open to organizations of all sizes, including:
- Small businesses and startups
- Non-profit organizations and charities
- Agencies
- Corporations
- Government organizations
Large organizations are eligible where the individual campaign meets the investment threshold.
What should your submission demonstrate?
Tell us how you made a limited investment work harder. Your submission should address:
- The challenge and objectives
- The audience insight or opportunity
- The resources and constraints you were working with
- Your strategic and creative approach
- How the budget was allocated
- How you demonstrated resourcefulness or found innovative solutions
- The results achieved
Judges will consider the scale of the results in relation to the resources available—not simply the absolute size of the results.
Judging focus: Resourcefulness, strategic thinking, creativity, efficiency, ROI and impact relative to investment.
This is the category for campaigns that prove you don’t need a big budget to make a big impression.
8. Marketing Excellence at Scale
Bigger Investment. Bigger Opportunity. Exceptional Marketing.
Outstanding marketing can happen at any level of investment, but when more resources are available, expectations are higher. Marketing Excellence at Scale recognizes campaigns that demonstrate exceptional strategy, creativity, execution and measurable impact with a campaign investment of $50,000 or more.
This category creates an opportunity for campaigns with greater investment to compete based on the quality and effectiveness of their marketing—not simply the size of their organization or budget.
Rather than competing based on organizational size, this category creates an opportunity for campaigns with comparable levels of investment to compete on a more level playing field.
What types of campaigns are eligible?
Campaigns must have a total campaign investment of $50,000 or more.
Organizations of any size are eligible, including:
- Corporations
- Small and mid-sized businesses
- Startups
- Non-profit organizations and charities
- Government organizations
- Agencies
What should your submission demonstrate?
Your submission should clearly articulate:
- The business or organizational challenge
- The audience insight and strategic opportunity
- The campaign strategy and big idea
- The creative approach and execution
- The role of channels, media, partnerships or other marketing tactics
- How the investment was allocated
- How the campaign was optimized or adapted
- Results against the original objectives
- Evidence of business, organizational or audience impact
The size of the budget is not a substitute for effectiveness. Judges will consider how effectively the investment was used to achieve the campaign’s objectives.
Judging focus: Strategy, insight, creativity, execution, resource allocation, effectiveness and results relative to investment.
Whether you’re launching a major national campaign or making a significant impact in a focused market, this award recognizes marketing that delivers excellence at scale.