Award show-offs [INSIGHT]

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

Creative awards are a necessary sand box for our profession.

No question about it.
Awards can give you visibility.
Awards are healthy boosters for an executive’s career.
Not necessarily for said executive’s employer, mind you.
The jury’s still out on that one.
But, hey, they are an important part of the R&D every industry needs to stay relevant and current.
The same “alternate reality” logic applies to other fields of the economy too: from garment to automotive.
Haute couture uses fashion shows to put out its wildest inspirations.
With a little luck, these extravaganzas will capture some headlines and earn media visibility for the designer or maison behind it.
Which allegedly translates into sales.
However, the wildly creative ideas one sees on the rarefied atmosphere of the runway, modeled on ultrathin goddesses and assorted winners of the genetic lottery, seldom make it to the racks at Macy’s.
The designs which ultimately get to be peddled to the increasingly overweight public tend to be sanitized a bit. Toned down a notch. Or five.
By the same logic, Chevrolet and Ford get good exposure from NASCAR.
“Win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” is a line used by NASCAR promoters to stress the fact that winning is good to attract shoppers to the dealerships.
However, duh, NASCAR vehicles are light years away from the wheels you’ll find in the lot.
It could be said that Ferrari’s entire marketing budget consists of the serious cash it burns in Formula 1 racing.
When Lebron scores, Nike sells more air.
In short: winning in the alternate reality of award shows is certainly better for an agency’s brand than NOT winning.

How far out of your way should you go to win awards?

It depends.
Are you a junior creative, a creative director, a chief creative officer?
Are you a CEO for hire or are you the agency’s founder, chairperson and controlling partner?
Is your agency independent or does it belong to one of the big conglomerates?
True: when the WPPs and PublicisOmnicom’s of this world go shopping around for up-and-coming independent companies, they look at arcane indexes combining revenues, earnings, cashflow and international awards.
But don’t fool yourself: most agencies are sold at 75% average annual revenues, period.
The founding partners who sell their agencies rarely collect until they go through a nerve-racking financial audit and a grueling 5 year-long earnout period.
Awards are a muddled afterthought when the lawyers and accountants show up at the negotiating table to beat you into submission and get your shaky signature on the dotted line.

Friends will be friends.

Ok, you are a creative, a careerist, you want exposure and accolades to burnish your personal brand and get sweeter job offers.
Let me ask you something: do you have lots of friends and colleagues who owe you favors working for competing ad agencies?
Because you’ll need them, and you’ll need them bad.
Enter the jury.
“Don’t even bother submitting work to an award show if you don’t have a friend in the jury.”
I didn’t make this up, I’m just the messenger.
It’s a running phrase in the industry.
It’s no secret that serious horse trading takes place behind closed doors during the jury’s deliberations.
The smoke-filled suites at the Hotel Martinez in Cannes have seen more backhanded negotiations, tit-for-tat and clenched jaws than the approval of Obamacare. And the Postdam conference. Combined.

Suggestions to make award shows more transparent.

-let’s borrow a page from the Academy Awards (the Oscars, that is). The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts & Sciences (talk about a pretentious name) groups over 6,000 members who vote for all the material. It’s not a perfect mechanism, it is certainly vulnerable to machinations, but it is better than 12 guys holed up in a room playing staring contests with blood shot eyes. The Webby Awards conducts itself this way: they have a 1,000+ member judging body under the aptly yet unoriginal name of International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS).
-let’s take it up a notch and use social media to make it as transparent as possible. It might become a chaotic free-for-all and some antibodies against rigging might be necessary. Again, it is far from statistically perfect, but it would foster a wider participation of the industry at large.

-if the aforementioned options are not feasible, at least try to include account execs, strategic planners, media people and CLIENTS in the jury panels. The presence of more clients will add a much needed reality check to the entire equation, putting on the table variables as ROI, tangible results and success metrics.

Young & restless?

If you are a young creative starting out in this racket, take an old dog’s piece of advice: don’t pay too much attention to awards.
Do try to win one or two every now and then.
Avoid the novelties, stick to the classics.
Spend your time and your employer’s hard earned cash sending work to the festivals that have been around forever, year in & year out.
It’s a good exercise.
The parties are fun.
But don’t lose sleep over it.
Don’t waste the best years of your life burning the midnight oil or working overtime on ghost ads (truchos, as we call them in Spanish) just for the sake of getting a tin statuette.
Do try, instead, to get closer to the client.
Some account execs will kick and scream, but it is your right to get to meet and hang out with the client.
Put yourself in the client’s shoes: why am I talking to a middleman (or middlewoman) account exec when I could be interacting directly with the folks who create my campaigns?
The client pays your salary. The client protects your job.
If the client loves you, you will be able to show up at work hung-over at noon and your boss will have to shut the f**k up.
If the client likes you, he/she might actually look the other way or even approve a ghost ad (a trucho) just to let you have your little trophy.
I kid you not, I’m speaking from first hand personal experience here.
More so, there’s no better award than having a client tell you that your ideas helped him/her get a promotion.

Guilty pleasure.

Speaking of ideas that never saw the light of day, another reason for the existence and proliferation of award shows is PSAs (public service announcements).
For some guilty souls out there, like yours truly, PSAs are a much needed badge of honor.
A way of making a difference, a way of giving back.
However, PSAs usually depend on the good will of media outlets to actually get a little airtime.
Problem is, PSA’s rarely get the best primetime inventory.
Change “rarely” for “never”.
PSAs are the stuff of graveyard shifts and YouTube.
Hence, the award show circuit is the last ditch for a PSA to be seen.
Its last hope to enter posterity.
Award shows are a PSA’s afterlife, its pious reincarnation.
Amen.

Politics & economics

The proliferation of creative festivals has gotten way out of hand.
The entire award show racket has lost credibility.
They prey on our insecurities.
They exist because we need something to worry about.
We need the challenge, the adrenaline, the thrill, the pat in the back.
Marketing and advertising can feel extremely irrelevant and frivolous at times.
“The intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” “Politics in academia is so vicious because the stakes are too low”.
This theory, which is sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger, actually belongs to the late political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre (thank you Wikipedia).
Extrapolate it to a business in which we essentially sell laundry detergent and voilá.
Hey, don’t be discouraged!
Take a step back and look around.
Your work pays the salaries and mortgages of an awful lot of people.
You might not see it directly, but your ideas help put food on the table of a lot of families.
Or do you think Procter & Gamble spends that kind of moolah in advertising because they like to hang out with a bunch of caffeine-addled, psycho-babbling, arty-fartsy hipsters with personal hygiene issues?

 

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