The Marketing Achievement Awards cut complexity and improved evaluation with Evalato

With Paul Martin, Adjudication Lead at The Marketing Achievement Awards

The Marketing Achievement Awards (MAAs) are held annually in South Africa and recognize marketing as a strategic business discipline. They honor the entire marketing value chain and highlight its various aspects. The MAAs give entrants the opportunity to demonstrate the positive impact of marketing and brand building as essential tools for growth and development.

Now in their fifth season, they set the benchmark for marketing standards by recognizing the most valuable contributors to society and business. Their goal is to build a repository of best-practice case studies to inspire all South African marketers.

But with all that ambition come operational challenges — and the solution known as Evalato.

Major pain points

Like many growing programs, the Marketing Achievement Awards started with a custom-built entry system. While tailored to their needs, it became more trouble than it was worth.

And that wasn’t the only issue:

• Secure file handling — Because entries contained sensitive commercial information, keeping those files secure and giving selective access to different judges was a huge hassle.
  
  
• Manual scoring — The old system couldn’t calculate results. Every score had to be added up by hand, and feedback documents were created manually before judges could meet to finalize decisions.

“The system we used in our first year of the competition was a bespoke-developed system designed to meet the specific needs of our entry process. Not only was this extremely costly to develop, we encountered many teething issues during the process and eventually had to resort to more than a few workarounds to make the system work properly.”  — Paul Martin, Adjudication Lead at The Marketing Achievement Awards

How Evalato helped the MAAs simplify their work

Evalato provides an easy-to-navigate and intuitive system that requires no advanced technical knowledge to run even the most complex competitions. Once the MAAs switched to Evalato, things got a whole lot easier.

Here’s how Evalato helped:

• Secure, smooth submissions — Entrants upload their case studies and evidence in a consistent format. Judges see the same structure every time, helping eliminate any bias from flashy presentations.
  
  
• Simplified jury process — Entries can be easily assigned to judges. Evaluation is clear, structured, and automatically calculated.
  
  
• Built-in communication tools — Instant feedback and result calculations save hours of manual work.
  
  
• Top-notch support — The Evalato support team proved to be quick and helpful in overcoming challenges.

“[Evalato] streamlines processes, particularly secure submission handling, jury allocation and evaluations with accurate result calculations and instant feedback, saving significant time and allowing us to concentrate on other aspects of the competition.” — Paul Martin, Adjudication Lead at The Marketing Achievement Awards

Paul also highlighted three Evalato tools that transformed how the Marketing Achievement Awards run their program:

• Easy allocation of entries to specific judges — Entries are assigned to the right judges by category and/or round to ensure a smooth and fair evaluation process.
  
  
• One-click clone — They can easily copy last year’s competition and make updates across forms in a few clicks.
  
  
• Effortless archiving — Keeping a clean and organized archive is now part of their routine.

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“This [standardized submissions] may well be specific to the nature of our competition, but it works well for us and complements the robust nature of our adjudication process.” —  Paul Martin, Adjudication Lead at The Marketing Achievement Awards

The results

While they haven’t crunched the exact time savings, the impact is clear.

The MAAs are now able to:

• Run a highly professional awards program with fewer resources
  
  
• Deliver a better experience for entrants and judges
  
  
• Continue building a library of world-class marketing case studies for South African professionals to learn from

“... Evalato makes running our competition a breeze, allowing us to focus more on people, rather than the operation of multiple tech solutions required to realise the same outcome.” —  Paul Martin, Adjudication Lead at The Marketing Achievement Awards

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