ABA Marketing Excellence Awards

Bank marketers produce strategic, thoughtful and dynamic campaigns that shape our industry every day. To better highlight these accomplishments and align with your goals, we’re retiring the Brand Slam awards and introducing the ABA Marketing Excellence Awards!

The submission period for the inaugural ABA Marketing Excellence Awards will be May 18, 2026 until July 23, 2026. Winners will be announced at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference in Austin, Texas, September 23-25, 2026.

Production for entries must be completed between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026. View the complete rules.

SUBMIT YOUR WORK  VIEW CONTEST RULES

Submission Requirements

• Campaigns launched between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, are eligible.
• A description of the campaign’s goals and results must accompany each entry.
• Video and audio submissions must be five minutes or less.
• A maximum of 25 files may be uploaded per entry.

Categories

• Brand Awareness
• Product Launch
• Digital Acquisition 
• Employee Engagement 
• Customer Adoption and Loyalty

Judging

Each category will be judged on an assigned percentage using the following criteria:

• Concept: Is the campaign concept creative, different and relevant? How well does it tie to the brand and target audience? In the case of integrated programs, is there cohesion and continuity across the campaign?
• Strategy: Does the campaign address and solve a business or marketing challenge? How well does the campaign deliver on its use of research, demographic targets, technologies and the end user?
• Creativity: Relative to the award category and target audience, how engaging, influential and distinct is the campaign?
• Execution: Are the results of the campaign seamless, smart and measurable?
• Impact/Results: Did the campaign achieve its objectives and goals? How did consumers receive the campaign, and what qualitative and quantitative data was gathered?

Acceptable File Types

• Video: MPEG, MPG, MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V
• Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV
• Images: PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, TIF, TIFF
• Documents: PDF, PS, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPS, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, RTF