Privacy Policy

The AdAura Awards 2026 (“the Awards”, “we”, “us”, “our”) is presented by Marketing Mind, a media property operated from Noida, India. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store and disclose information when you interact with adauraawards.com, register as a nominator, sit on the jury, or contact our team.

By using the site or any AdAura service, you consent to the practices described here. If you do not agree, please discontinue use.

1. Information we collect

• Account data — name, organisation, designation, email, mobile number when you register to nominate or sit on the jury.
• Entry data — campaign details, brand & agency credits, dates, descriptions, files (PDFs, images, video links) uploaded to support a nomination.
• Payment data — Razorpay transaction identifiers and metadata only. We never receive or store full card / UPI / bank credentials.
• Communication data — messages submitted through the Contact form, sponsor enquiries, support emails.
• Technical data — IP address, browser, device, referrer URL, pages visited, captured via standard server logs and reCAPTCHA risk scoring.

2. How we use it

• To process nominations and present them blind to the jury.
• To send transactional notifications — OTP verification, submission acknowledgements, payment receipts, shortlist and winner announcements.
• To collect entry fees and issue GST-compliant tax invoices.
• To prevent fraud and abuse via Google reCAPTCHA v3 and IP-based rate limiting.
• To improve the awards programme — anonymised analytics on category interest, completion rates and submission funnel.

3. Legal basis (India — DPDP Act 2023)

We process personal data under the lawful grounds of consent(registration, marketing) and legitimate use (payment processing, jury operations, statutory accounting under the GST Act). Sensitive personal data is not collected.

4. Sharing

We share data with a small set of vetted processors strictly for service delivery:

• Google Workspace (Gmail SMTP) — outbound transactional and lifecycle email delivery from awards@marketingmind.co.
• Razorpay — payment gateway and GST invoice reference.
• Cloudflare R2 — encrypted object storage for entry decks, videos, images and supporting documents.
• MongoDB Atlas — managed primary database hosted in the AWS Asia region.
• Google reCAPTCHA v3 — bot / spam detection on public forms.

Each processor is bound by their own enterprise data-protection agreements and processes data only on our documented instructions. We never sell personal data and we do not run third-party advertising trackers.

5. Retention

• Entry submissions, scores and accolades — retained indefinitely as part of the AdAura editorial record.
• Tax invoices and payment records — retained 8 years (statutory requirement under the GST Act).
• Account credentials of unsuccessful drafts — purged 18 months after the close of the edition.
• Contact-form messages and sponsor enquiries — retained 24 months.

6. Your rights

You may at any time request access to, correction of, or erasure of your personal data (subject to statutory retention obligations). To exercise these rights, write to awards@marketingmind.co with the subject line “DPDP request”. We respond within 30 days.

7. Cookies & tracking

We use first-party cookies strictly for session authentication. We do not run third-party advertising trackers. reCAPTCHA loads Google’s analytics cookies for risk scoring; this is required for spam protection and cannot be opted out without disabling form submission.

8. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+). Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes. Backups are encrypted at rest in Cloudflare R2 with daily automatic snapshots of the production database. We notify affected users within 72 hours of confirming any personal-data breach.

9. Children

The Awards are intended for marketing professionals. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

10. Updates to this policy

We may revise this policy from time to time. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent change. Material changes will be announced via email to registered nominators and jurors.