The ANDY Awards' ElectTheJury.com homepage.

"It's an honor just to be nominated" is shedding its disingenuous tones with ElectTheJury.com, a new initiative by JWT and the ANDY Awards that has the industry abuzz.

Created under the stewardship of co-chairs Ty Montague, JWT North America co-president and CCO, and Michael Lebowitz, founder and CEO of Big Spaceship, the website asks the creative community to vote in the jury of this year's ANDYs in an effort to better reflect the state of advertising.

"The business is in such a period of change and evolution, and we felt like award show juries in general hadn't really kept up," says Montague. "Software, technology and design people are much more important to the future of the business than they are given credit for on most award show juries. As a solution to this problem, we thought we'd open it up to the industry and really try and get an accurate snapshot of where we are as an industry by crowd-sourcing the jury."

Upon its launch, Elect The Jury posted more than 100 nominees from all facets of the industry, as well as outside of it. Next to folk from the traditional ad world appeared names as diverse as game designer Jane McGonigal, graffiti artist Banksy, fashion designer Marc Jacobs and Talking Heads front man David Byrne.

"We divided [the nominees] into three sections: people with a traditional advertising background, people with a digital or technology background and a category that we described as ‘other'," explains Montague. "[‘Other'] would be people from industries that are adjacent to advertising and technology with whom we need to get better at collaborating. People from the content or product design industry; people from the web and social media sites... things of that nature."

In an effort to make Elect the Jury a truly democratic process, voters are allowed to add to the list of candidates. So far 100 more names have been added to the nominees list. The selection process will run for four weeks and the final jury of around 25 will be announced on Dec. 1.

In the spirit of friendly competition, nominees such as CP+B's Andrew Keller, Ogilvy's Lars Bastholm and TBWA\Chiat\Day's Rob Schwartz have taken to the campaign trail, posting messages on Twitter and text-to-voice animated videos on YouTube in an effort to garner votes.

"People have really gotten engaged," says Montague. "The spirit of it is really friendly and cool, which is great to see. It's exactly what we hoped for."

Opening the jury to a voting process is the first for any award show, and it matches another first for the ANDYs - the sharing of the chairmanship between Montague and Lebowitz.

"Naming Michael as my co-chair was a symbolic act," says Montague. "I wanted to let people with a digital or interactive background know in a very clear way that their voice would be heard on this jury. Michael is very well regarded in the digital and interactive space and is very connected to a lot of people that normally wouldn't have thought to enter any work into the ANDYs. In doing so, we hope to broaden the show's appeal."

The collaboration between Montague and Lebowtiz has already seen significant changes to ANDYs categories. The viral category has been eliminated and a unique category has been created to award agency innovation.

"We decided that viral is a goal, not a category," explains Montague. "The second thing we did is create a category for agency research and development. So projects that are created by agencies just to try new things, test new technology or play around. We think this is something that should be encouraged in the industry so we wanted to make that statement by creating a category for that work."

The first call for entries into the ANDYs is Nov. 20 with a second call on Dec. 1.

"I hope we'll get much more of a diverse group of people entering work this year," says Montague, who notes that along with more of a digital presence, he'd like to see the Canadian ad industry step up a bit more and have a presence. "I'd say that will be proof of concept."

www.electthejury.com
www.jwt.com
www.bigspaceship.com