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Never miss ANY awards deadline again, with help from RKCR/Y&R

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

July 28, 2011 | 4 min read

RKCR/Y&R has built and now launched an online tool to help other creative agencies across the globe keep track of every award entry deadline in the industry - in their own admission, "a mammoth job!"

The free service, called T-Minus, has been developed to help creatives around the world keep track of up upcoming awards deadlines, allowing them to plan getting their projects out of the door without the usual last minute panic.

The T-Minus website enables users to choose from the 130 awards currently registered globally, then download their own personal calendar as a dynamic infographic screensaver, which tracks not just the awards entry date, but the date on which work has to run in order to qualify for entry.

T-Minus was created by Steve Moss and Jo Finch at RKCR/Y&R in collaboration with digital hotshop B-Reel.

Damon Collins, Creative Director at RKCR/Y&R says: “For creatives the self-inflicted pressure to win awards is constant. And the stress of making sure your work has appeared by the various dates of each of the numerous awards competitions only adds to that pressure. No matter how brilliant your work is, if it’s not eligible for or entered into the competitions no one’s walking for anything.

"Steve and Jo always had a sheet of layout paper on their desk listing awards deadlines and they’d cross off the weeks as they went by. Having been caught out in the past they used these calendars to remind themselves when they needed to pester me, the account team or the client, to make sure a particular piece of work was approved, made or had run.

"We thought it would be great to create a digital version of those scraps of paper: a utility that anyone who had ever suffered that last minute panic of “Christ, it needs to have run by next week and it’s not even shot yet!” could benefit from.”

Mark Wheeler, art director at B-Reel added: “We considered several approaches to the awards calendar dilemma before deciding on an approach that could remind without intruding and yet also provide enough detail to be genuinely useful. The solution is a tight combination of ambient information – a screensaver that passively reminds you of deadlines – as well as detailed reference information in the form of a fast, flexible, one-page website that's accessible from anywhere.

"As well as creating a practical tool for creatives we also wanted to make something that would look great aesthetically running as your screensaver every day. The result is a constantly updating colourscape, with individual award deadlines growing and becoming more agitated as units of time flow around them. Given how often you see a screensaver we felt it important to add as much variety as possible to this view, so opted to use physics-based animation throughout. Working like this makes for some cool but unexpected results – you have to be ready to experiment and see what happens!”

The calendar launches with over 130 creative awards worldwide, from UK-based D&AD, Roses and DADI awards to the Asia and Dubai Bespoke Awards.

Plans are being developed to further enhance the product with a series of new services – such as an archive of past winners, an awards newsfeed and social networking functionality. Various options to monetise T-Minus in are currently in development.

The product is free to download from http://www.t-minuscountdown.com

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