2024 AME Grand Jury Spotlight Interviews celebrate the exceptional minds shaping the landscape of advertising and marketing communications. Our esteemed panel for 2024 includes visionary leaders renowned for creating influential, results-oriented campaigns for leading brands worldwide.This diverse jury coming from top-tier agencies around the globe represent some of the most recognized creative and strategic trailblazers in the industry. Their dedication to driving impactful, innovative work not only sets the standard for excellence but also inspires future generations of marketers and advertisers.

Florencia Herrero brings over 14 years of strategic insights and marketing expertise to the 2024 AME Grand Jury panel. As Creative Marketing Manager working on regional innovation projects  for The Walt Disney Company’s top franchises she specializes  in crafting immersive brand experiences and creative integrated campaigns with compelling storytelling thanks to her copywriting and digital background. She shares massive experience honed in previous postions throughout her career blending creative with strategy at agencies like Ogilvy, BBDO, La America and DAVID.

In the interview below Florencia shares her perspective on innovations and trends brands are embracing for 2024, how emerging technologies are shaping advertising, what she's looking for in award-winning stand out work, and more.

AME Awards: Why are effectiveness competitions like the AME Awards important?

Florencia Herrero: We understand that effectiveness festivals like the AME Awards are crucial as they highlight campaigns that, with creativity, achieved impactful results on business or brand equity. However, their true importance lies in facilitating the growth of brands over time, laying down robust foundations for a strategy that the brand’s next project must challenge to exceed previous accomplishments. In doing so, it constructs a curve of genuine and sustainable growth. So, it's not just about demonstrating that the campaign wasn't designed solely to win an award; instead, these awards offer guidance in constructing authentic brands and delivering value in the long run."

AME Awards: As a creative strategist, what stand-out attributes do you recognize in award-winning creative effective advertising?

Florencia Herrero: The attributes that catch my attention are the ones that contribute to campaigns that leave a lasting impact on audiences and achieve measurable results. Besides innovative concepts, I love compelling storytelling, capable of blending strategic relevance with emotional resonance, and strong visual impact. Successful campaigns should engage the audience, tap into cultural context while maintaining consistency with brand identity and why the brand is talking about that in the first place. And what makes it even more interesting, is the willingness to take calculated risks to create impact, without getting lost in the flashes to drive results.

AME Awards: How are emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and interactive content shaping the landscape of advertising effectiveness?

Florencia Herrero: Emerging technologies (that by now they aren’t so emerging after all), are transforming advertising effectiveness by reinventing storytelling and providing innovative ways to engage with audiences. Not only with different ways of delivering a message and options to shop, but by offering new immersive ways of experiencing products and services. These technologies enable product visualization, virtual try-ons, and the actual feeling of interacting with the brand, fostering personalized experiences and increasing user engagement. When applying them right, for an actual user need or using meaningful cross-platform integration, advertising campaigns stand out and we ensure a consistent conversion rate and user experience, while data and analytics offer valuable insights for the brand and for ourselves -the creative community- to learn from.

AME Awards: In terms of conversational marketing, how do you develop and implement strategies that leverage AI-driven interactions to enhance the customer experience?

Florencia Herrero: Enhancing the customer experience through conversational marketing involves strategically integrating AI-driven creative interactions. It begins by taking your time to understand customer needs and choose impactful messages with appropriate channels.

Integrate AI-powered technologies that offer personalized responses and foster a continuous learning environment for AI systems -and ourselves- to improve over time the balance between automated interactions and human touchpoints.

I personally love this creator culture impact, and I believe AI has a lot to bring to these types of campaigns and spaces where everyone has the power and ability to participate and interact with brands and products.

AME Awards: What future forward trends and innovations are brands embracing for 2024?

Florencia Herrero: I could start naming all the future trends reports we all know and read with the same list of highlights that go from sustainability, AI tech, neuro-marketing, color of the year and all the XR, VR and AR, etc. But what I really like, (and hope that continues) is that Web3 is definitely changing the paradigm and it won’t matter what brands and marketers are embracing but what the people and actual users are looking to explore and develop. Brands should listen more and present spaces where everyone feels welcome to not only give feedback but take part in the creation of products and services that they offer.