The guys behind ihaveanidea.org and Portfolio night released their new project yesterday: The Tomorrow Awards. It's the first award show of its kind that has no categories – it will be all about the best ideas independent from their media platform. The other twist is that the shortlist will be crowd-sourced by the industry, everyone can register as a judge and help choosing work which will the be presented to the 'Monster Judges'. This team consists of jury chief Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer, AKQA, Mark Chalmers, partner and creative director of Perfect Fools, Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer, TBWA Worldwide, New York, Naoki Ito, executive creative director, Wieden+Kennedy, Tokyo, Sergio Mugnaini, interactive creative director at ALMAP BBDO Brazil and Robert Wong, executive creative director at Google Creative Labs. For me, this sounds very exciting. I worked as a graphic designer in Germany, I learned about traditional advertising on internships and freelance gigs in creative agencies in London and now I'm almost finished with my postgraduate course in Interactive Art Direction at Hyper Island in Sweden – and I don't want to be in any of these boxes. I see myself as a creative working with strategic concepts, choosing the media depending on relevance and with the purpose of telling a story in the best way possible.
The Tomorrow Awards are doing a great step of defying unnecessary boundaries and categories. Let's help them celebrating the future of advertising and stop putting ideas into boxes.
