SLIM Ad Awards on March 4

THE SLIM Awards ceremony will be held on March 4.

The theme for the 17th annual awards ceremony will be 'Great Ideas'.

The Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing (SLIM) was founded in 1970 (then called the Ceylon Institute of Marketing) with a view to harnessing the available skills in marketing for the growth and development of the profession.

"Over the years, we have seen many determined creative teams coming together and SLIM Ad Awards has created a platform so that the creative experts in our country will be given the opportunity to rub their brains against each other and to be rewarded for all their hard work." Chairman of SLIM Awards 2006 and Secretary of the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing Lewie Diasz said.

The Panel of Judges for SLIM Awards 2006 comprise professionals representing the advertising and marketing fraternities.

The winning agency, regardless of stature, will simply be the one which in the opinion of judges, best meets the criteria stipulated for each particular category. In other words, it will be a selection of the best out of the rest.

For the first time in the History of the Awards show SLIM is to introduce a comprehensive DVD with over 3 and 1/2 hours of recorded material, 150 winning ads, commercials and campaigns together with the Judges Comments and important additions of last years show.

The SLIM Ad Awards 2006 organising committee recently finalised the two foreign judges from Japan and the Philippines.

They will be joining a panel of 10 local judges to take part in a three day judging process evaluating creative and MarCom Excellence of over 29 local agencies expected to take part in 2006 Awards show.

The Daily News is the media sponsor for the awards.

Meanwhile Executive Director Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing (SLIM), Nimal Weerasekera said that the pull out of the four AAAA's (AAAA) has not had an impact on the awards ceremony.

"We are going ahead with the ceremony", he said. He said that the SLIM Executive Committee, members from AAAA, International Advertising Association (IAA) and representatives from advertising agencies attended a meeting last week.

"There was no problem or protest at this meeting," he said.

Our intentions were to have a fair representation from a body that represents all advertising agencies and sadly this representation did not meet our expectations and certainly not our intention.

Two years later, we are left with our independence being threatened by the board of the AAAA's who imposed daunting demands and irrational changes for the awards show.

Last year, the aftermath of the tsunami devastation made us realise that we must come together as one and included the International advertising Association as a partner for the awards show.

This year, we have decided to stand our ground and make it a truly independent SLIM Awards show in March 2006. We wish to mention that this is done in the best interest of all multinational, local, large, medium and small advertising agencies.

"We accommodated the attached ideas from the AAAA's and SLIM accepted many ideas and were compelled to leave out a few ideas which were not feasible and fair by all 140 agencies in our country.

We as the National Body and an Independent Authority will stand by our decision to uphold the integrity and avoid any manhandling of the awards show by maintaining our independence in order to make it a truly represented awards show.

"We stand our ground for the awards show in 2006 and wish to communicate to the media and advertising industry that it is your Independent Awards show. You can make that decision," he said.