Epica Awards: The Complete Guide to the Creativity Award Judged by Journalists

 La guida completa per Agenzie e Brand agli Epica Awards, in questo nuovo numero della rubrica Gold Brief. 

Every jury decides who deserves an award. Epica’s can also decide who deserves a story.

Since 1987, the Epica Awards have been the only international creative competition judged by journalists. More than 200 editors and senior reporters from over 60 countries assess campaigns, design projects, films, activations and technological innovations through a different lens from that of traditional industry juries.

They are professionals used to comparing thousands of campaigns, identifying market shifts and recognising the ideas capable of entering public conversation.

Adweek, Campaign, Ad Age, Digiday, Creative Review, Business Insider and Forbes are among the publications represented on the jury, specialising in design, technology, production and communications. Entries are therefore assessed by the very people who report on the industry every day.

In this Gold Brief article we examine how the Epica Awards work, the category structure, the role of the jury, the judging criteria and the steps needed to build a competitive entry.

Gold Brief is the Bliss blog category for those who want to understand how recognition in marketing really works. In this column you will find practical guides to the international awards that matter (creativity, strategy, performance, design, SEO, innovation and much more), with everything you need to enter. Because the perfect brief is not written in a day: if anything, it is built every day.

The Jury Is the Prize

The most important feature of the Epica Awards lies in its definition: “The creative prize judged by journalists”.

At most international advertising awards, work is judged by senior figures from the very organisations that take part in the awards system. Epica, by contrast, entrusts the verdict to observers from outside the agencies.

The journalists on the jury understand the dynamics of the industry, follow the major festivals, interview professionals and analyse the most significant campaigns. Their position remains distinct from that of those who took part in producing the work or who compete directly for the same clients.

Jurors focus on the idea and its execution, and during the selection of winners each journalist is excluded from voting on projects from their own country.

A creative jury looks at the originality of thinking against the standards of the discipline. A journalist, by contrast, also assesses the project’s ability to be understood, told and remembered.

The Advantage That Begins Before the Win

Epica puts entries in front of the press from the earliest stages of selection, changing the usual sequence of the awards.

Jury members can write about the work they have reviewed through articles, interviews and in-depth features, followed by publications, social media, international exhibitions and content dedicated to the winners.

At Epica, the project comes into contact with the media system during judging. An entry that catches a juror’s attention can therefore generate interest before the results are published.

Coverage remains an editorial choice. Its value stems precisely from journalists’ freedom to decide which work deserves closer attention.

As analysed in the Gold Brief article on awards and bargaining power, the value of an award grows when it comes from an external source able to strengthen how the agency is perceived. Epica adds potential editorial amplification to this validation. The crystal pyramid certifies the result. Articles, mentions and interviews can turn it into reputation.

How the Epica Awards Are Organised

The 2026 edition features 77 categories organised into six main areas. The structure starts from product sectors and extends to creative techniques, craft, design, digital environments and special categories.

The Industry Specific categories allow work tackling similar problems to be compared, even when it uses different media.

A campaign for a luxury brand can be entered in Luxury & Premium Brands for its ability to interpret the codes of the sector. The same project could find a place in design, photography, branded content or integrated communications, depending on which element the agency wants to put before the jury. The category therefore directs attention, and choosing it means deciding which part of the project will have to carry the entire entry.

Public Relations: When the Campaign Becomes News

The Technique categories look at how communication takes shape, and within this area Public Relations takes on a particular significance.

Projects are judged by people who work directly in the media and know the difference between spontaneous attention and paid distribution. A campaign built to generate earned media must show the step that turned an activation into a story.

The number of publications reached matters, but the reason those publications chose to cover it certainly matters more.

A strong PR entry makes this sequence evident: the project produces a fact, the fact generates news, and the news expands the meaning of the idea.

Impressions can document reach; editorial value explains why that reach happened.

Copywriting & Storytelling: The Category That Judges Words

The Craft & Imagery categories include Copywriting & Storytelling.

Having this category in an award judged by journalists creates one of the most interesting contests of the entire competition. The words are assessed by professionals who work every day with headlines, intros, interviews and narrative structures, and who are used to recognising the point at which a sentence stops informing and starts holding attention.

A copywriting entry must hold up even when the visual execution is pared back to a minimum. The copy can build tension, define a voice, change the meaning of an image or make a familiar truth memorable. Formal quality gains value when it makes the thinking clearer.

AI Craft and Creative Use of AI

Epica distinguishes craft produced through artificial intelligence from the creative use of AI within a campaign.
AI Craft covers images and videos created primarily with the support of artificial intelligence. The assessment centres on the quality of the result, together with the control exercised through prompting, iterations and production workflow.

Creative Use of AI, by contrast, looks at the role of technology in the idea. AI can transform data, personalise an experience, build a generative system or make possible an interaction that is relevant to the audience.

The distinction reflects the change of phase analysed by Gold Brief in the article on artificial intelligence and marketing awards.

The mere presence of the tool has lost its power to differentiate. Juries want to understand what role the technology played and what value it generated.

Wild Ideas: The Space for the Unclassifiable

The 2026 edition introduces Wild Ideas, a category for films, campaigns and activations: projects that are unpredictable or built through formats that standard rules struggle to contain. In this industry, creativity is invited to break conventions and then slotted into very rigid entry menus.

When an idea invents its own medium or cuts across several disciplines, choosing a category often becomes an exercise in approximation. Wild Ideas creates a space for work whose strength lies in precision and originality, which must be legible. The execution, in turn, must support the project’s ambition.

The Judging Criteria

The Epica rules focus judging on the originality of the idea and the quality of execution.

Concision makes the judgement more severe: a very broad set of criteria sometimes allows a project to offset a weakness through other dimensions. Epica, by contrast, looks directly at the heart of the work.

Clarity and editorial relevance derive from the composition of the jury rather than from an official scoring grid. 
Epica also allows the jury to move a project into a more appropriate category and to leave an award unassigned when no entry reaches the required standard.
The presence of entries guarantees competition. Quality decides whether the award is given.

Gold, Silver, Bronze and Grand Prix

Category winners receive a crystal pyramid and a certificate. The hierarchy comprises Gold, Silver and Bronze, while the best projects of the edition can go on to compete for the Grands Prix.

For 2026, Grands Prix are planned for Film, Print, Innovation, Digital, Public Relations, Media and Design. In addition, there is the Responsibility Grand Prix, selected from work dedicated to the public interest.

The Grand Prix takes the project beyond its own category.

At that level, the campaign is measured against the best ideas of the year, produced across different disciplines, markets and languages. Its strength must therefore transcend the specific context in which it was born, as if the idea had to be able to travel.

The Italian Case: Landor’s Design Grand Prix

In 2024, Landor won the Design Grand Prix with its rebrand of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, helping to renew perceptions of the institution by turning music into a contemporary identity that conveys movement and openness.

The project comes from an Italian institution, works with a heritage deeply rooted in its place and still manages to be understood by a jury drawn from dozens of countries. Cultural specificity becomes a strength because it is translated into an accessible idea.

The case connects to the under-representation of Italian agencies at international awards, a theme Gold Brief has already addressed.

The quality of Italian work finds its place when the entry manages to make its value evident beyond the codes of the domestic market. Internationalising the case study starts with translating the meaning, then the language. 

How to Build an Epica Awards Entry

The competition is open to advertising agencies, production companies, design studios, media consultancies, professionals, photographers and advertisers from all over the world. For the 2026 edition, eligible work must have been approved by the client and used, published or broadcast within the period set out in the official rules.

The structure of the entry changes according to the media type.

For the Print categories, Epica excludes the case study. The jury sees the ad in the form in which it appeared in the world. The rule places full responsibility for the entry back on the execution. Here, the idea has to stand on its own.

For Digital and Alternative, the video case study can run for a maximum of three minutes. The materials must make the context, mechanism and impact clear.
As explored in the Gold Brief guide on how to build a video case study for an international award, the edit must make the relationship between problem, insight, solution and results evident.

At Epica this principle carries particular weight, as the jury quickly recognises a well-constructed story and just as quickly spots a narrative that tries to stand in for the quality of the project.

The Idea in Brief

Every entry needs a formulation capable of containing the project without diminishing it.

In 2023 Epica trialled an AI juror tasked solely with assessing the written summary of ideas in certain technology and digital categories. The experiment did not count towards the official awards, but it showed how central the description of the idea was considered to be in the process.

The summary must make clear what was delivered and which insight set the project apart.

“An innovative campaign that engaged the public” could describe thousands of entries.“A car used its own security cameras to shoot a film” already contains a fact, a mechanism and a reason to keep reading.

This is the thinking behind “Night Fishing”, INNOCEAN’s project for Hyundai IONIQ 5, built by turning the car’s cameras into a cinematic tool.

When the idea is strong, the summary looks simple, and it is precisely that simplicity that comes at the end of the process.

Epica Awards 2026 Costs

Participation requires a company registration fee of 200 euros, waived during the Early Bird period. On top of this comes the fee for each execution entered.

Entries completed during the Late Entry phase incur a 10% surcharge. Card payments carry an additional 3% fee. The fee is only the most visible part of the investment.

On top of the entry fee come internal time, project selection, case study production, translation, review of materials and coordination with client and partners.

As analysed in the article on the ROI of an awards strategy, the real cost comes from the full set of resources needed to make the project competitive.

Epica Awards 2026 Calendar

The Early Bird window avoids the company fee and requires the team to complete its project selection well in advance.

Submissions put together close to the deadline are often produced before the agency has defined precisely which part of the work should be judged; bringing the entry forward therefore means giving the strategy time.

Which Projects Stand the Best Chance at Epica

Epica favours work that retains its strength even when separated from the reputation of those who produced it. The project must have a legible idea, a proportionate execution and an element capable of sustaining a conversation.

In 2024, the Digital Grand Prix went to “The Co Worker” by Mother London for IKEA, a project that turned a Roblox environment into a real recruitment space.
The Innovation Grand Prix went to “Animal Alerts” by Serviceplan Germany for PetPace, which used smart collars to turn dogs’ behaviour into an earthquake warning system. Both projects contain a news story in their very premise.

Epica Awards and International Positioning

An Epica Award gives the work validation from the international press. For an agency, it shows that the campaign has passed the judgement of observers used to comparing projects from all over the world; for a brand, it means associating its name with an idea considered relevant beyond the market in which it was born.

Here, value grows when the award is built into an editorial strategy capable of extending its visibility. The pyramid can go on the Awards page of the website. The project should also feature in pitch materials, in the agency’s commercial narrative, in the profiles of the professionals involved and in digital PR activity.

The Lesson of Epica

Every day journalists receive material, and their job is to separate what adds something from what simply takes up space. Epica brings this criterion into a creative award.

A winning entry must cross geographical borders, professional languages and editorial sensibilities while keeping its idea intact. At Cannes a campaign can become the benchmark for creativity. At the Effies it can become proof of effectiveness. At Epica it becomes a story worth telling.

It is this ability to turn creativity into news that makes the award one of the most interesting to include in an international awards strategy today.

New Connections (FAQ)

Can an Italian agency enter the Epica Awards?

Yes. The competition is open to agencies, production companies, design studios, media consultancies, photographers, professionals and advertisers from around the world. Work must be approved by the client and fall within the eligibility period set out in the rules.

Can an entry generate visibility even without winning?

It can happen. Journalists on the jury may choose to write about the work they saw during the selection process. Coverage depends on the editorial interest of each individual entry and remains an independent decision of the publications.

Which project works best in front of the Epica jury?

A project with an immediately legible idea, coherent execution and a story capable of holding its value outside its original context. The campaign must give the jury a precise reason to stop, understand it and remember it.