First held in 1990, the Times Asia-Pacific Advertising Awards serves as a platform to encourage cross-national exchange and development of the advertising industry in the Asia Pacific region. Each year, renowned and accomplished talents from Asia Pacific offices are invited to judge the thousands of brilliant works from more than a dozen countries, rendering the event one of the most long-standing, influential and recognized advertising awards as well as one of the biggest celebrations of advertising business within this area.
Bearing the objectives in mind, the organizer of the TAPAA has always been striving to provide opportunities for advertising professionals to exchange ideas and learn from each other for the past two decades. The comments and discussions among judges as well as presentation of extraordinary ideas in each year's competition also help to escalate the number of entries. It is our hope that the Times Asia Pacific Awards will continue to generate more participation and to contribute to the inspiration of overwhelmingly big ideas through the friendly competition.
As a celebration to the 2008 Olympic Games, Olympic Games Special Categories are created this year to give recognition to the marvelous Olympics-related campaigns as well as all the efforts involved. There are also several minor changes in the specification of Outdoor and Online ads award categories in order to be more consistent with trend and to provide better opportunities for the great works in these categories to be seen.