Effie Awards Korea

Effie gives awards to advertising that worked. Not the prettiest campaign — the one that moved the numbers. Effie Awards Korea runs the Korean edition each year: agencies enter their best work, a jury scores it, and the winners get a trophy that clients actually care about.

Entering was a stack of paperwork. A written entry form of nine questions over seven pages, creative material — a presentation, a three-minute video, or the video with stills — an entry confirmation, a credits and campaign summary sheet, a permission form, and proof the entry fee had been paid. Every agency in the country sending that in by email would have buried the two people running the awards.

So the work was entry.effie.kr: an agency registers a free account and fills the entry in steps — entry details, file uploads, media and results, credits and the Effie Index, permissions and authorisation — and can see what is still missing before the deadline. A CodeIgniter application on our own server, in English and Korean throughout, because the same form is read by a Korean agency team and by an international network office.

Around it, the public site: the season calendar, the how-to-enter pages, the dates and fees, the seminar notices. Small edits, often the same day, through a season that ran to the 9 January 2015 entry deadline and judging in February.

Running it was part of the job — the database backed itself up nightly on a cron, and the system stayed up through 2016. Nothing of it is live now. effie.kr today is somebody else's rebuild, which is why this entry shows the mark rather than a screenshot.