Google, Microsoft, GoCompare, Linkedin, Deliveroo: Meet The Drum Search Awards 2020 jury

I am looking forward to judging these awards. The Drum is THE place for what is happening in our industry and what better way than to recognise those that are paving the way forward with innovative and strategic thought. I will be looking for those that are doubling down on excellence, you don’t just have to have done something with shiny new things, innovation can come from delivering the best search experience that drives real value.

I'm really looking forward to seeing in-house teams pulling out all the stops on projects that have delivered significant results. I’d love to hear stories of strong multi-disciplinary team working to deliver results outside of the sometimes insular SEO stratosphere. Anything based on impeccable content – not necessarily campaigns though - and I’ll be super excited.

I'm returning to judging panel for a second year. I'll be looking for entrants to highlight great uses of data and creative flair that has led to demonstratable business impact.

We are in a result-driven landscape and search marketing campaigns are expected to have clear objectives and measurable outcomes. I am looking for campaign entries that have utilised data, insight and creativity to achieve these set objectives. A clear and explainable campaign implementation process is valuable. These positive results should be based on causation and not mere correlation.

These awards highlight the very best of the best. Not only do they bring together some of the finest industry talent in a display of unique strategy and campaigns, each category truly sets the benchmarks for success for the future. As a judge, I’m able to see first-hand the innovation taking place on a daily basis and that provides me with a unique opportunity to learn along the way. I’m excited to see the entries. A little tip: I’ll be paying close attention to those who best take their objectives and distil them into a solid, creative strategy that delivers.

I'm hoping to see more focus on working smart and leveraging technology to deliver intelligent search solutions that make a real difference to businesses. It would be great to see smart applications of cognitive services APIs to more scenarios, be it for natural language understanding, detecting sentiment, key phrased or named entities or simply helping advertisers make smarter decisions faster.

I’m really looking forward to reviewing the entries for The Drum Search Awards. The awards bring out the brightest and best in the industry. This year, I’m going to be on the lookout for companies that have leveraged data & automation to solve unique challenges. Companies who have been able to do that will definitely stand out from the crowd.

It's not about having the biggest budget but about being clever with the money that you have! Therefore, I'm looking forward to seeing good ol' SEO making an impact on the business targets but innovation and out of the box thinking will no doubt grab my attention.

I’m looking forward to reading what innovative thinking search practitioners came up with, and how their passionate execution resulted in campaign performance surpassing expectations. With paid search and SEO being a complex beast, it’s not easy to craft a structured narrative so I also hope to see great story telling. What will stand out for me is not only entries with client-centric campaigns which truly focus on growth, but also those that understand what initiatives significantly contributed to their outcomes and how these became transferable learnings.

I’m excited to see how the entrants are using search more effectively, combining new technology, with pioneering techniques to show growth in their results. Importantly, I’m keen to to see how they are measuring and presenting results and how they can be attributed to to their work clearly.