As April 2 approaches, the industry is entering the final phase of submissions for the 35th edition of the Slovenian Advertising Festival (SOF), one of the key regional meeting points for creativity, strategy and market results.
According to this year’s rules, entries can be submitted until April 2, 2026 at 23:59, and the right to apply is open to agencies, companies and authors whose projects were carried out for the Slovenian market and first publicly presented in the period from April 3, 2025 to April 2, 2026.
Focus on the quality of the submission, not just the idea
SOF once again clearly emphasizes that the submission is not just a formality, but a key part of the evaluation. Particular focus is placed on precisely defining the impact of the project, that is, how and where the communication solution achieved concrete results.
This year’s edition brings several important changes to the competition structure. Among the key novelties is the new category Long-term Social Responsibility, intended for projects that go beyond one-off campaigns and have a longer-term social impact. At the same time, Social Media Management has been separated as a standalone group within multichannel communications, further confirming how managing social media today requires its own strategic and executional logic.
Changes are also visible in the submission structure itself. This year, organizers are placing additional emphasis on more precise definition of the project’s impact within the category to which the work is submitted, so that the jury can more clearly assess in which segment the entry achieved a concrete result. At the same time, the maximum duration of the presentation video has been shortened, now set at up to two minutes, while for two long-term categories a format of up to three minutes is allowed.
Special emphasis is also placed on ethical guidelines and sustainability principles, which are no longer just a broader framework of the festival but are becoming an important part of how works are observed and evaluated. In addition, the Digital group has been further redefined. The category of comprehensive digital solutions has been removed, and the focus has shifted toward more specific and clearly profiled entries, among which the category Creative Use of Artificial Intelligence particularly stands out.
How are decisions made?
The decision-making process is once again based on a multi-phase evaluation model. In the first round, all members of the SOF Competition Academy are given access to an online presentation of submitted works and evaluate them with a simple decision of whether a work deserves to be shortlisted or not. Works that receive at least 60 percent of the votes at this stage automatically enter the shortlist.
This is followed by the second phase, in which expert juries review shortlisted works live by sections, discuss them and confirm the final shortlists, with the possibility of assessing through professional debate whether any work is missing or if there is an excess in the selection. Only after that comes the final phase of deciding on awards, when the jury selects the winners of gold and silver recognitions, and among the works that win gold, decisions are also made on the Grand Prix awards.
More than awards
Although SOF awards remain the central motivation for submissions, the festival is increasingly positioning itself as a reflection of the state of the industry. Through the selection of works and evaluation criteria, SOF does not measure only creativity, but also the industry’s ability to respond to market, social and technological changes.
In this context, the final days of submissions are not just an administrative deadline, but also a moment in which it becomes clearly visible what the industry has considered relevant over the past year.
