The Effie Awards are marketing communications awards given yearly by Effie Worldwide, Inc., a non-profit organization, to honor the most effective marketing communications ideas: ideas that work. Effie Worldwide's mission is to encourage effectiveness among the marketing communications industry through education and recognition.
The Effie Awards were started in 1968 in the United States by the New York American Marketing Association a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the art of marketing among professionals. The award expanded globally after its founding in the US, with the first programs emerging in Germany in 1981, in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland in 1984, and in France, Chile and Peru in the early 1990s.
Today there are over 40 national and regional Effie programs worldwide — in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East/North Africa. Effie programs honor the most effective marketing communications cases within a country, across regions and globally.
In addition to hosting annual events, conferences and webinars to recognize the winners and educate around the marketing communications ideas that drove their success, Effie publishes an online database of winning cases and the results they achieved as an educational tool.
As it is sometimes thought to be an acronym, Effie is considered a pseudo-acronym, since the letters do not stand for individual words. In actuality, the name is an abbreviation, derived from the word effectiveness, which is the hallmark of Effie.