The Pitcher Festival of Creativity has opened entries for the 2024 edition of the awards. Prospective awardees can submit entries from November 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024. The award ceremony is scheduled to hold from 16-18 of May, 2024.
The organisers of the awards have also announced the introduction of two new categories in the 2024 edition, as well as a revision in some of the old categories.
The new categories are Effectiveness and Culture. The Effectiveness category has two subcategories, Business Impact and Societal Impact. It will honour works that can demonstrate creativity and at the same time show a measurable successful impact on business, environment, or society. The eligibility period is from 1 January 2019 to 31 March 2024.
The Culture category focuses on PR initiatives and campaign ideas that spark or transform pop-culture, consumer behaviour or internal corporate and value chain. There are six subcategories here: Use of Cultural Insights, Media Relations & Brand Storytelling, Internal Culture & Employee Engagement, Excellence in PR, Public Affairs and Lobbying. The other two subcategories, Use of Influencers & Brand Ambassadors as well as Corporate Image and Reputation Management were migrated from the Channel category to enable the jury focus more on core media topics. The Culture category will follow the regular eligibility period from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2024.
The new subcategories in Channel are Use of Integrated Media, Excellence in Media Planning and Excellence in Media Execution. Integrated Campaigns subcategory has been added to the Heritage category to acknowledge the creative ingenuity required in delivering a successful campaign in 3 or more media formats that work together excellently.
Pitcher has also announced two new special awards in 2024 to recognize agency networks that are doing great work at various locations across the continent – the Africa Agency Network of the Year and the Africa Media Agency Network of the Year.
The Pitcher Awards, described as a Pan-African benchmark for creative excellence is now in its 7th edition and entries are open to campaigns, ideas and initiatives created, released or implemented anywhere on the African continent.
