The Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing announced their plans and innovations for holding the twelfth SLIM Ad Awards on 24th February 2001. SLIM is now collaborating with the newly formed Accredited Advertising Agencies Association (Four A’s) in the planning and implementation of the project.

A joint blueprint committee of the two organizations has reviewed and improved various aspects of the awards programme to ensure better satisfaction among all participants. One area that has received attention is entry categories — with a view to ensuring more homogenous categories, better category definitions and greater congruence with how the categories are growing. The number of categories has been increased with Food, Beverages, Automotive, Entertainment and Leisure, Banking and Financial Services, Investment, Insurance and Real Estate now established as separate categories, whereas they previously existed in combination. Another is the judging process — with a view to ensuring greater fairness and consensus in the selections. The pricing for participation has also been adjusted downwards to encourage more agencies and smaller agencies in particular to participate. And to top it all, SLIM has increased the number of awards to over 120 this year.

The joining of hands between SLIM and Four A’s is mirrored in the theme for the 2001 awards which is all about "client-agency partnership". Not only will the ad campaign for the awards and the event itself carry this theme, two new innovative awards have been introduced for marketers, to reflect the role they play as clients in creating great advertising. These awards, for "The Agency Motivator of the Year" will recognize a client person who has worked successfully with an agency to achieve excellent results, and another for "Breakthrough Brand of the Year" will allow marketers and their agencies to jointly present a marketing communications case where new ground has been broken in the marketing of a brand.

SLIM has retained the familiar "Bell" trophy given the equity built around this over the years, though it created a special "millenium design" for the awards held this year.

"Coordinating an event such as this requires substantial funding and commitment from sponsors" said Ravi Bamunusinghe, Chairman of the Awards programme, "CIC Paints (Pvt) Ltd has come in as a Main Partner for the fifth year while Coco-Cola Beverages Sri Lanka Ltd is with us for a third year and Ericsson Telecommunication Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. is a main partner for the second time." Other support has been received from Daily Mirror, MTV/Yes FM, Business Today, Sir Lanka Exhibition and Convention Centre, Ceylon Intercontinental Colombo, Sri Lankan Airlines, Graphitec and Swedish Trading Audiovisual, who are all co-partners.