The 'Justifying Our Bloody Existence' LoerieThe new Creative Effectiveness Award at this year's Loeries has sparked plenty of discussion, much of it around what separates it from the long-established Apex Awards. As I understand (and I'm a judge in this Loeries category so I hope to heck I've got this right) an APEX is about the successful business impact of a campaign which may or may not have had an especially creative idea or execution, while the Loerie rewards those campaigns which were awarded first on a stand-alone basis for their creativity and then can be proven to have delivered outstanding results for the client as a result of that innovation. Actually, the finer points of difference don't really concern me that much because we need both of these awards and any other credible ones we can generate in this space. It should not have escaped the attention of anyone in the industry that we are in a data driven era and we need to constantly prove, as best we can in an imperfect world, that what we get paid to do deserves its slice of the company budget. I'm afraid the overblown glory of a purely creative award is simply not enough to make that case nor is it sufficient to repeat the well-trodden stat from 'The Case for Creativity' by planner James Hurman that the company which has won the most Cannes Awards has outperformed its competitors on the stock market eight out of ten times in the past ten years. The hungry data monster needs much more food than that. The new pinnacle of the global awards gameThe new Loerie is unashamedly modelled on the Cannes equivalent which was introduced in 2011 and has already become, in my view, the new pinnacle of the global awards game. An agency can really roar about a Lion if it speaks to both brilliance and bucks. Now it's ditto in the local arena for a Grand Prix. Just the entry process for these Effectiveness Awards alone is an invaluable tool for gaining focus within the agency. Sure, it's a time-consuming pain in the backside to compile a compelling and crafted factual argument over hundreds or thousands of words rather than just sending off a pretty print ad or a funky TVC to the judges for their creative consideration, but the exercise has a number of spin-offs:
So this new Loerie helps to justify our existence. It's good for agencies and their clients. Let's enter it, support it and aim to produce work that will win it. About Gavin LevinsohnManaging Director at Ogilvy Cape Town
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