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All submissions for the 2026 ABA Marketing Excellence Awards must be completed by Thursday, July 23, 2026. 

Bank marketers produce strategic, thoughtful and dynamic campaigns that shape our industry every day. To better highlight these accomplishments and align with your goals, we’re retiring the Brand Slam awards and introducing the ABA Marketing Excellence Awards!

Please visit ABA.com for important details about the awards and stay up to date throughout the year with the ABA Banking Journal.

Once you are ready to submit your marketing materials click “Enter Here” to begin the entry process.

ENTER HERE

Categories

  1. Brand Awareness
  2. Product Launch
  3. Digital Acquisition
  4. Employee Engagement 
  5. Customer Adoption and Loyalty

Submission Requirements

  • Campaigns launched between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026 are eligible.  
  • A description of the campaign’s goals and results must accompany each entry. 
  • Video and audio submissions must be 5 minutes or less. 
  • A maximum of 25 files may be uploaded per entry.

Judging 

Each category will be judged on an assigned percentage using the following criteria:

  • Concept: Is the campaign concept creative, different and relevant? How well does it tie to the brand and target audience? In the case of integrated programs, is there cohesion and continuity across the campaign?
  • Strategy: Does the campaign address and solve a business or marketing challenge? How well does the campaign deliver on its use of research, demographic targets, technologies and the end user?
  • Creativity: Relative to the award category and target audience, how engaging, influential and distinct is the campaign?
  • Execution: Are the results of the campaign seamless, smart and measurable?
  • Impact/Results: Did the campaign achieve its objectives and goals? How did consumers receive the campaign, and what qualitative and quantitative data was gathered?

Winners

ABA will recognize the Marketing Excellence Award winners at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference in Austin, September 23-25, 2026. 

Acceptable file types 

Video: MPEG, MPG, MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V 
Audio: MP3, WMA, WAV 
Images: PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, TIF, TIFF 
Documents: PDF, PS, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPS, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, RTF 

Complete ABA Marketing Excellence Awards rules