Creative awards without borders. Part 2 of 3

By Gonzalo López Martí  –  LMMIAMI.COM

• Award shows can become a collective hallucination far too removed from reality. Many a creative considers award festivals a safe haven where “ideas” can be celebrated sans that pesky client intrusion.
• Award shows can be a collective guilt trip too: many a creative feels dirty about making a living in such a capitalist, phony trade.
• Especially Hispanocatholic creatives.
• (It takes one to know one.)
• On the other hand, when self-loathing & dirty consciences are properly channeled in productive ways the outcome can be plenty positive.
• Public service announcements (PSAs) are usually the result of this curious outbreak of anti capitalist yet avidly consumerist existential angst experienced by many creatives, particularly Hispanic ones.
• Occupy Madison Avenue!
• LOL
• This obsession with protecting creative purity has an odd consequence in our side of the tracks: work from non-US Hispanic agencies is not admitted at US Hispanic creative award shows.
• Banned.
• C’mon, folks.
• It is like cheating at solitary.
• Inbreeding.
• Opening up to international shops could be a healthy revenue stream for AHAA &/or el Círculo.
• Award shows are a business.
• A pretty profitable one.
• Participants pay steep fees to partake.
• Thus the proliferation of festivals.
• Cannes, for one thing, incorporates new categories every year.
• Some of them quite arcane.
• Of course, they need their customer base to be happy.
• They want to distribute as many Lions as possible to keep entries coming year after year.
• It is a business, folks.
• A good one indeed.
• I know, we Latinos suck at business.
• No new news there.
• For us, money is taboo, ignoble, filthy.
• Making money makes us feel guilty and dirty.
• We are a collectivist, hierarchical and paternalistic culture that punishes profit and frowns upon success or “achievement”.
• Our Catholic upbringing?
• Maybe.
• Who knows.
• Thus the misconception that US Hispanic award shows should be pure and protected from the immoral influence of filthy lucre.
• Wake up folks.
• This mentality is stunting the growth of a good thing.
• It is self-sabotage.
• Opening it up would funnel in much needed cash to take it to the next level.
• Four words: more open bar parties.
• It’d fuel competition.
• Competition begets innovation.
• A vibrant award show scene will put pressure on us to come up with better work.
• The good news is, some heavyweights are lobbying to change this isolationist state of affairs.
• It should not come as a surprise that one of the heavyweights I’m talking about is a wildly successful creative AND businessperson as well.
• I can’t disclose his or her identity because he/she spoke off-the-record, but you do the math.
• Of course, award show proliferation & inflation hurt the intrinsic value of each individual award.
• Not all awards are created equal.
• One’s gotta be selective.
• Some festivals are more prestigious than others.
• Let them fight for your entries
• Then again, anyone from anywhere in the planet can submit work to the One Show or D&AD.
• They welcome it with open arms and they command a premium.
• AHAA & El Círculo should follow suit.
• Circling the wagons is not the solution.
• We might feel we are protecting a precious thing from carpetbaggers & arrivistes.
• Yet sealing the borders to external competition will only make us provincial and complacent.
• Folks, we are Latinos.
• We ARE carpetbaggers & arrivistes by nature.
• We cannot shun our own kind.
• The US Hispanic market might be the most promising and vibrant phenomenon to happen to the US economy in the last 25 years (outside of Silicon Valley, of course).
• A mentality of “now that I’m in shut the door behind me” would be suicidal.
• Not only for us Latinos but for America as a whole.
• Since we are at it: what’s with the schizophrenic relationship with Puerto Rico?
• When it suits us, we consider it a part of the US Hispanic market.
• Boricuas come in handy to inflate & embellish the stats on our PowerPoint decks.
• However, Puerto Rican agencies are deliberately thrown under the bus when it is time to judge the collective creative output of the year.
• If I had a penny for every time I heard a Puerto Rican complain about how their work is boycotted in continental US Hispanic award shows I’d be able to pull the island out of bankruptcy.
• They might be right.
• If we were fair, we would have to give all the awards to Jaime Rosado alone.
• If you ask me, Jaime is the best creative director in the US Hispanic market.
• By far.
• It’d save lots of time & money to just call off the award ceremony and give him all the awards.
• He comfortably makes the list of the top ten best creative directors in the Spanish-speaking world.
• But he lives & works in Puerto Rico so we only consider him US Hispanic when it suits us.
• Mind you, boricuas themselves are partially responsible too for this more often than not confusing duality.
• Not sure whether Jaime would consider himself a US Hispanic professional.
• We’ll leave that for another rant.
• To be continued.