A conversation with the digital marketing leader on serving as a jury member for some of the industry’s most respected awards — and why judgment, not just achievement, defines real authority in the field.
There are people who win awards, and there are people trusted to decide who wins them. Mila Tkachuk has done both. A digital marketing and performance strategy leader based in Los Angeles, California, Tkachuk was named Gold Winner in the “Digital Marketing Leader of the Year” category at the 2025 ECDMA Global Awards, and separately recognized as Winner in the “Best Performance Marketing Professional” category at the 2025 Best in Business Awards (BIBA), an international program that drew more than 440 nominations from professionals in over 30 countries.
Over the past year, Tkachuk has moved increasingly to the other side of that process. She has been invited to serve as a juror for three internationally recognized industry competitions: the AdForum PHNX Awards (2026), the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards (2026), and the Effie Awards (2026) — each of which selects its judging panels through an invitation-only vetting process open to a small fraction of nominated industry professionals.
We sat down with Mila to talk about what that responsibility actually looks like from the inside — the standards, the debates, the moments where a single point separates Gold from Silver — and why she considers her work as a judge to be the part of her career she takes most seriously.
You’ve had a remarkable run of recognition in digital and performance marketing. But lately, you’ve been on the other side of the table — as a judge. How did that shift happen?
Honestly, it wasn’t something I set out to plan. It happened gradually, almost as a natural extension of the work itself. Once you’ve spent enough years building and defending campaigns — proving that a strategy actually moved a business forward, not just that it looked good in a deck — organizations start to see you as someone who can evaluate that same rigor in other people’s work. That’s really what an invitation to judge is: a peer group saying, “we trust your judgment enough to let it shape the outcome for someone else.”
Let’s start with AdForum’s PHNX Awards, where you served as a juror this year. What was that experience like?
PHNX was a fascinating one because of the breadth of categories. You’re not just judging one type of creative output; you’re judging craft against strategy against measurable impact, sometimes within the same sitting. The scoring window ran from March 27th through April 6th this year. Each juror scores submissions independently on a 1–10 scale through an online voting system, and the averages determine the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners. The Grand Prix entries go through something more intense — a live debate among the Grand Jury, where you have to actually defend your position to other judges who’ve reached a completely different conclusion.
What struck me most was how selective the jury itself is. Hundreds of professionals are nominated every year, and only a fraction receive a formal invitation to the Board of Judges. Sitting alongside people like Alican Kilicoglu or Roxanne Janse — people with very different regional and disciplinary perspectives — you quickly realize the jury is designed to resist a single point of view. That’s what makes the average score mean something.
You also judged the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards this year. That’s a very different field from traditional advertising. What was your role there?
That one pushed me outside my comfort zone in a good way. Since 2013, the program has evaluated advances across 46 major AI application types and 36 industries — not just marketing, but technology, operations, product. As a judge, I was reviewing entries where AI was applied specifically to marketing and digital transformation problems, using the program’s structured, in-house scoring methodology designed to keep things consistent and free of bias.
What I appreciated was how much weight is placed on real-world outcomes rather than novelty for its own sake. It’s easy to be impressed by a clever use of AI. It’s harder to ask, “did this actually solve the problem it claims to solve, and can it be trusted at scale?” That’s the question I kept coming back to with every submission.
And then there’s Effie — one of the most established names in effectiveness marketing, with over five decades of history. What does judging at that level demand?
Effie is a different animal because of how rigorous and quantified the process is. This program has been running for 56 years and now draws on a judging community of more than 25,000 industry leaders worldwide. My own review window fell in mid-to-late February this year. Every entry is scored across four defined sections — Challenge, Context & Objectives; Insights & Strategic Idea; Bringing the Strategy & Idea to Life; and Results — each on a scale from 10 to 100, and each carrying its own weight in the final score. You’re not giving a gut reaction. You’re building a case, section by section, for why a campaign actually earned its results rather than just correlating with them.
Being part of that jury, alongside senior marketing leaders from companies like Pinterest and Newell Brands, reinforces something I believe strongly: effectiveness has to be provable, not just persuasive. That discipline changes how you evaluate — and honestly, it’s changed how I build campaigns for my own clients since.
Across all three juries, is there a common thread in how you personally approach judging someone else’s work?
Consistency and humility, in equal measure. Consistency, because a score only means something if you’re applying the same bar to the tenth entry as you did to the first — even after reviewing dozens of submissions in a short window. Humility, because judging isn’t about imposing your own creative taste. It’s about asking whether the work achieved what it set out to achieve, on its own terms, and whether that achievement is real and defensible — not just well-presented.
Your own recognition — the ECDMA Global Awards Gold Winner title, the Best in Business Awards win for Best Performance Marketing Professional — how does that experience of being evaluated inform how you now evaluate others?
It keeps me honest, actually. I remember exactly what it felt like to be scored — to know that a panel of people I respected was weighing my work against a strict rubric, not against goodwill. When I sit on a jury now, I try to give every entrant that same seriousness. Someone put real work into that submission, and they deserve a judge who’s actually paying attention, not going through the motions.
Looking ahead, what role do you see judging playing in your career?
I see it as an ongoing responsibility rather than a milestone I’ve checked off. Every jury I join teaches me something about where the industry is heading — what strategies are actually working, what “innovative” really means this year versus last year. It keeps me sharp as a practitioner. But more than that, I think the people who are trusted to evaluate this work have an obligation to protect what the award actually stands for. That’s not a small thing, and it’s not something I take lightly.
Mila Tkachuk is a Los Angeles-based digital marketing leader recognized internationally for her work in performance marketing and digital strategy, including as 2025 Gold Winner, Digital Marketing Leader of the Year (ECDMA Global Awards) and 2025 Winner, Best Performance Marketing Professional (Best in Business Awards). In 2026, she has served as an invited juror for the AdForum PHNX Awards, the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards, and the Effie Awards.
