Creative awards without borders. Part 1

By Gonzalo López Martí  –  LMMIAMI.COM

• Another year, another award season.
• Last week we saw a cool display of fresh thinking at the USH Idea Awards hosted by Círculo Creativo & AHAA.
• The bar is getting visibly higher.
• Biased as it may sound, it was refreshing too to see how the Hispanic Account Planning Excelencia Awards  (HAPE) and the Hispanic Media Planning Excelencia Awards (HMPE) are steadily gaining traction, attention and mileage (as you might know, HAPE & HMPE are an initiative of this publication).
• A tip of the hat to the Zubi gang for their copious HAPE & HMPE harvest.
• Let’s not forget that Zubi is one of the last staunchly independent full-service agencies left in this ever-consolidating wasteland of an industry.
• It is too a healthy reminder of the fact that this business exceeds the siren songs, smoke & mirrors emanating from the creative department.
• In any case, creative award shows are a necessary & useful professional lab to broaden the psychological and factual horizons of our output as a self-proclaimed pop culture-shaping line of business.
• Granted, the whole thing can become an exercise in collective masturbation.
• Still, it is a healthy sand box to keep our reflexes alive and expand our limits.
• Speaking of boundaries & frontiers: US Hispanic agencies pride themselves year after year of increasingly winning awards in prestigious international festivals.
• Such as Cannes, Fiap, El Ojo, Wave, San Sebastián.
• A good sign indeed.
• Now then, we rarely, if ever, hear about an agency from México, Brazil, Argentina or Spain bragging about winning a statuette at a US Hispanic competition like, say, el Círculo.
• For one thing, agencies outside the US Hispanic orbit don’t bother submitting work.
• Plus, even if they tried, they would not be admitted.
• Why?
• Protectionism?
• Isolationism?
• Exceptionalism?
• Fear?
• Inferiority complex?
• All of the above?
• Case in point: a few years ago I was creative director of WPP’s SCPF office in Miami -an agency from Spain that opened shop in the US to cater to the US Hispanic market & Latin America.
• First order of business: we happily became card-carrying members of AHAA.
• Come festival season, I submitted a bunch of campaigns to AHAA’s creative award show, which back then was co-organized and sponsored by AdAge.
• Mind you, some of my submissions were campaigns from our Barcelona & Madrid offices.
• It doesn’t get more Hispanic than that, does it?
• Well, said entries were rejected because they had been created and run outside the US Hispanic market.
• Kick-ass work for BMW & IKEA, among others, which already had obtained accolades abroad.
• I remember getting a very polite, soothing and carefully worded call from AdAge’s Laurel Wentz about us having been disqualified, as per Aldo Quevedo, who was the president of the jury.
• I’m not pointing fingers at Aldo, Laurel or the jury: they have worked very hard along the years to raise our standards.
• The fine print was & is clear.
• I just hadn’t bothered reading it.
• I’m still waiting for the refund though.
• I had absentmindedly assumed that, since we were full members of AHAA and the work was 100% in Spanish (unequivocally accented Spanish from Spain) our submissions were a shoo-in.
• On an anecdotal note, the very founder of SCPF, Toni Segarra, who was Chief Creative Officer of the agency, had supervised all of the rejected campaigns.
• A guy that lives and works in Spain and had been a judge at AHAA’s show a few years prior.
• In fact, he had been president of the jury.
• So you are allowed to be a judge but you are not allowed to submit work?
• Talk about a paradox.
• You are invited for the very reason you are considered an authority in advertising creativity in Spanish but your work is not qualified to participate.
• The good news is, some heavyweights in the very kitchen of El Círculo are angling for this to change.
• I was told in private by a top dog that, sooner rather than later, el Círculo will officially admit international entries.
• Stay tuned.
• Funny thing is, we all know of various campaigns that were not created by or for the US Hispanic market proper and still have won awards throughout the years.
• Most of them regional campaigns for Latin America that manage to camouflage themselves and slip through the cracks because they are voiced in “neutral Spanish”.
• You know what?
• I applaud them.
• My respects.
• These tricks are good to raise the bar.
• Yeah, there are lots of tricks of the trade to legally circumvent the rules of award shows in one’s favor.
• Selecting the right category to enter your work, for instance, is an art form in and of itself.
• I’m not saying the game is rigged.
• But it certainly is biased and has lots of unwritten rules.
• There’s a difference, say, between dodging and evading taxes.
• Should a formerly male trans athlete be allowed to participate in a female Olympic competition?
• Ok, bad analogy.
• Back to ads.
• Exhibit A of creative award shows: don’t bother submitting work if you don’t have a vocal friend or advocate among the judges.
• Exhibit B: PSAs
• Exhibit C: there will always be truchos (ghost ads) and there’s little we can do about it.
• We can’t ban them.
• The formula is simple: create a trucho, run it on some free or dirt cheap graveyard shift media insertion and you’re good to go.
• Which leads us to the “borderline truchos”: campaigns for film festivals, art shows, tattoo parlors, NGOs and so on.
• We can’t do anything about it.
• If it pays its fees, the entry must be accepted.
• People will know it is a trucho.
• Clients will know too.
• Truchos are not fooling anyone at this point.
• Still, if the idea is good and it stimulates a new or different creative path, it deserves exposure and is positive for the industry.
• Even if the campaign is a “favor” to a fly-by-night client who obviously is not paying a dime or might not even exist.
• An agency who goes out of its way to try and bring to life fresh creative approaches should be rewarded for it.
• Not with a gold statue, of course, but an honorary mention never hurt anyone.
• It is a healthy annual catharsis among peers.
• Because, c’mon, do clients really give a damn about creative awards?
• How about consumers?
• Sure, your client will be happy if you win a Grand Prix in Cannes with a campaign you did for them.
• Anything below that is irrelevant.
• Why all the bickering then?
• From a strictly dollars & cents POV, awards are good career exposure for junior creatives and that’s about it.
• Some people claim awards increase the valuation of an agency.
• Really?
• To what extent?
• “In academia, politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low”, says the running phrase mistakenly attributed to Henry Kissinger
• The same could easily be said about the world of marketing & advertising.
• In the US Hispanic market, as in all walks of life, we are not immune to the itch.
• To be continued next week.