Each year, the International Business Awards, known as the “International Stevies,” draw numerous nominations from organizations around the world. Behind every Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie is a panel of seasoned professionals who read, score and debate the entries. We asked three Filipino judges from different industries what separates a forgettable submission from one that earns a trophy. Their answers differ in emphasis, but they share one conviction: effort alone doesn’t win. Proof of what the work changed does.
Jed Estanislao: The Power Of A Sharp Idea
For Jed Estanislao, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer of Eastern Communications, a strong entry rests on three things: a clear idea, a solid strategic rationale, and meaningful results. He wants more than an account of what an organization did. He wants to understand the problem or opportunity it faced, why it chose its approach, and what made that approach different or better than the alternatives.
What makes him take notice is an entry that changes how he sees a problem. He looks for the moment when a submission makes him think, “That’s smart. I hadn’t looked at the problem that way.” In his experience, such entries rest on a genuine human or business insight. They show a team that understood the challenge deeply before finding a creative way to solve it.
Estanislao also values simplicity over spectacle. A focused idea, executed exceptionally well, can carry far more weight than an elaborate campaign built mainly to look innovative. Creativity matters, he noted, but creativity that drives results matters much more.
He sees the same missteps often. Many entrants list activities, platforms and executions without explaining why any of it mattered. Others lean on words like “game-changing” or “highly successful” instead of showing what changed and by how much. He also warns against confusing volume with impact, since more channels and more content don’t automatically make a better campaign. With judges reviewing many entries, he advises telling the story quickly and clearly, from challenge to insight, idea, execution and result.
Kristel Artates: Making The Case For Value
Kristel Artates has built her career in PR and marketing communications across telecommunications, consumer banking and fintech, and she judges with a business lens. She looks first for a real problem, whether a business challenge, a customer need or a community issue, and for the insight that explains why the campaign needed to exist.
She then looks for strategic clarity, and above all for impact. Reach, engagement and virality have value, in her view, but they shouldn’t be the final measure of success. She wants to know what a campaign actually achieved: revenue, customer acquisition, retention, trust, behavior change or community benefit, and ideally a clear return on investment. “Reach tells you who saw the message,” she said. “Impact tells you what changed because of it.”
For Artates, this goes beyond awards. Organizations increasingly expect communications to show its contribution to business outcomes, not just visibility. Teams that can show the value they created, she believes, are the ones that earn communications a place at the executive table.
The entries that impress her trace a logical path from challenge to insight, insight to strategy, and strategy to measurable results. Judging entries from around the world has also reinforced her belief that, whatever the market, the best campaigns rest on a genuine understanding of people and their context. “The best campaigns do not just create attention,” she said. “They create value.”
Her response to what mistakes an entrant makes includes a timely warning. Besides confusing activity with impact and listing tactics without strategic context, she cautions against relying too heavily on AI tools to write entries. AI can help organize information and polish a draft, she acknowledged, but too much of it makes a submission sound generic. The strongest entries still carry a clear narrative, an authentic point of view, and evident understanding of the people behind the challenge and the campaign.
Tony Valdez: The Complete Package
Tony Valdez, Senior Vice President and Head of Market Transformation and Retail at ACEN, evaluates entries against a framework built over decades in marketing. He starts with the consumer or customer insight, which he calls the seed of any strategy. He then looks for diligent research and market data, and for a strategy that shows creativity and original solutions. He sees strategy as sitting at “the crossroads of art and science.”
From there he examines the creative work, the measurement of results, and how all of it is presented. Whether the entry is a video, a slide deck or an essay, he expects it to hold together within a tight format.
The entries that stand out to him combine all these elements into one complete, compelling and internally consistent narrative, supported by strong creative work and presented with conviction. His advice on mistakes follows from this: leaving out any piece of the framework weakens an entry. The gaps he sees most often are weak measurement of results and a lack of creativity.
Blen Fernando: Substance Over Spectacle
Ma. Belen “Blen” Fernando, a multi-awarded marketer with leadership experience in both local and multinational companies, starts with focus. She wants an entry to state its strategic goal, or at most its top three objectives, clearly and single-mindedly, and to explain why those objectives mattered to the brand. The key insight behind them should be plain to see.
When she assesses execution, she isn’t looking for grandeur. She looks for alignment and simplicity of process: proof that every part of the effort served the objectives. She also wants results with substance. Views and likes don’t impress her. Concrete outcomes such as sales and brand awareness do, because they show a campaign moved the business forward, not just that it produced vague, feel-good gains.
Fernando also pays close attention to the values an entry reflects. She looks for a genuine sense of purpose, real advocacy and honest connection to local culture, not values added on for show. She has noticed that many entries borrow heavily from events and formats abroad, and that submissions from some markets have started to look, sound and think alike, with only small changes from one year to the next. Such entries may carry big budgets, she observed, but they do little to move the marketing discipline forward. She also appreciates entries that are honest about what could have gone better and what the team learned.
For her, the entries that stand out show objectives clearly achieved, with results directly tied to those objectives. A big budget and grand presentation are not requirements. She often sees entries that pile many activities together to look large and costly, and the effort rarely impresses her.
That trend shows up in her list of common mistakes. Too many entries offer generic observations and fluff instead of authentic, clear measures of success, relying on foot traffic and likes rather than hard results. Many chase a grand look, only to blend in with every other entry. She also encourages entrants to include a video summarizing the whole case, since it shows the look, feel and consistency of the work in a way text cannot.
She is especially candid about the categories that honor marketing teams and leaders. Many of these entries, she noted, focus too much on the entrants themselves. If a team or leader can point to only a single strong case study, she suggested, the entry should be pitched at a more modest level. In her view, these honors should recognize a holistic body of work built over time, one that combines business results with genuine advocacy, and she questions whether the same names should keep winning on the strength of one campaign.
Her standards for the awards themselves are just as high. With dozens of winners named each cycle, she believes judging criteria and scoring should be stricter, so that a Stevie keeps its meaning. She also has a pointed message for organizations that resubmit the same work year after year: “Let’s stop that just to have more entries.”
The Common Thread
Each judge brings a different emphasis: Estanislao on sharp insight, Artates on business value, Valdez on completeness, and Fernando on focus and authenticity. Yet their advice points the same way. Winning entries don’t just describe activity or impress with scale. They explain the thinking behind the work, back their claims with real evidence, and tell a clear, honest story of what changed because of it. For organizations preparing their next IBA submission, the challenge is to present their work with the same clarity and discipline that made it succeed.
