12th October 2012

From: London International Awards

Contact: Rebecca Morgan: beccy@liaawards.com

LIA 2012 Judging and Inaugural Creative Conversations

LIA has held an award ceremony in London every year for 26 years. In recent years, in the midst of a global recession, many of our winners have not had the budget to fly half way across the world simply to go up on stage for a minute or two of recognition. Awards Presentations are, by their very nature, an ideal opportunity to mingle with your colleagues and peers and we wanted to find a way to keep this element alive. It occurred to us that having already gathered the cream of our industry for judging in Las Vegas (now in its 4th year as our worldwide judging location) that the budget that we had for the one night awards presentation could be better used bringing International Creatives from around the world together to share their experiences and to discuss the future of advertising, design, brand-building and the overall state of the creative global markets.

This year, we went to the ECD’s of the major agencies, media outlets and various Advertising Associations from around the world and asked them to select individuals that would either be rewarded for their hard work or those that might benefit from a global gathering of creative minds. The ECD’s we discussed this with agreed whole heartedly that both seminars and ‘one to ones’ with Industry leaders had much more relevance and would be far more beneficial than ‘yet another’ Awards Presentation.

So LIA set up a 3 day series of seminars, ‘conversations’, lunches and dinners that we hoped would both be educational and stimulate positive discussion around the future of Advertising.

The response was tremendous. Many of the Creatives selected by their superiors where not necessarily at a junior level and already had fairly established careers. Initially this was a little unnerving for us and our guest speakers as we looked upon an audience of people of similar age and experience. We need not have been concerned, the conversations were relevant, inspiring and reassuring on every level and not one of the attendees has left Las Vegas without taking something positive from the assembly of like-minded individuals.

It was an overwhelming success and we have invited the ‘young’ and the ‘not so young’ attendees to comment candidly on the whole experience and how they would like to see the ‘LIA Creative Conversations’ evolve in the years to come. We have had amazing and productive feedback and look forward to implementing some of these ideas for next year.

You can view the winners and finalists, images and video footage of the speakers, our jury and a cross section of our ‘Young Creatives’ on our website: www.liaawards.com or on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/LIAAWARDS