No Bias. No excuses.  The Epica Awards 2021 campaign is reminding you that its judges are not creative rivals. It was created by Amsterdam agency, Cloudfactory, and uses insider humour and irony to highlight the awards’ point of difference. Epica is judged by journalists, not creatives. Entering great work is the only way to win.

The Awards are now open for entries until October 8. Enter here.

“As far as most awards shows go, the advertising industry seems to be the only one where we insist on judging ourselves,” stated Cloudfactory creative, César Garcia, “We wanted to point out the absurdity of this while also explaining why Epica is different.”

Cloudfactory creative, Julio Alvarez, added, “One of the things we like about the campaign is that it reflects a reality. As creatives we do actually use excuses like ‘most of the jury was from a rival network’. So we thought we could have fun with that and be a little provocative at the same time.”

Production company, Be Sweet Films, is helping the agency bring the campaign to life with a series of short films using the same theme.

As a creative duo, how do Alvarez and Garcia as a creative duo feel about journalists judging creative work? “We don’t create work for other creatives,” Garcia noted. “We want to touch everyone. There’s no reason why a different kind of expert shouldn’t judge the work.”

Cloudfactory managing director, Sandeep Chawla, added, “We don’t have a monopoly on creativity.”

Garcia and Alvarez found themselves in the media spotlight when they joined Cloudfactory to help reboot the agency, which was founded in 2012 but has remained somewhat under the radar, despite award-winning work and clients such as Heineken, Booking.com, KFC and Twitter. The creative duo previously worked on global accounts for Adidas football at TBWA\Neboko and Philips global at Ogilvy Social.Lab. They refer to themselves as “creative activists”, because their goal is to liberate brands’ creativity through a culture they’ve named RST – Respect, Simplicity and Trust.

The Epica ceremony this year will be on December 9 and will be online again. “Things may evolve but for now we’d rather wait till we’re all completely out of the health crisis before taking chances on physical events. That means voting will be online once again as well,” Epica operations director, Nicolas Huvé Kousmichoff, commented. Voting begins on November 8.