Your mom should be on the Loeries panel

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The Creative Circle’s annual rankings are calculated based on an agency’s performance at international (Cannes, D&AD, and The One Show) and local (the Loeries and the Creative Circle Annual Awards) shows. These awards celebrate creativity, giving some prestige and glamour to an industry defined by late nights, sad desk lunches while rushing to meet a deadline, and revert after revert on that deadline. They’re an opportunity for agencies and their employees to build a creative reputation, attracting new clients and headhunters.

But they don’t quite paint the full picture.

Making work for each other, not clients

Award shows play an important role in setting a standard in creativity for the industry. And it’s been proven that campaigns that are awarded for creativity drive business results (they get 11 times the return on investment, according to James Hurman).

But, while certain campaigns that deliver outstanding business results do tend to clean up (Nike’s ‘Dream Crazy’ took Nike’s stock value to an all-time high, increased overall revenue by $6m and won 27 awards at Cannes, including 2 Grandes Prix, one Titanium and five Gold Lions), work that doesn’t actually do the job of selling something, or saying something about the brand it’s for, is still picking up awards.

Nike wins Emmy for Colin Kaepernick ad

16 Sep 2019

We’re making work for each other, not our clients.

If we continue to prize awards over results, we run the risk of prioritising work that’s beautifully-crafted and technically superb, but does nothing for the client’s business. This kind of advertising, created with an awards entry in mind (because that’s how the agency gets a better ranking and how the team gets a better salary) isn’t the most effective way to spend client money and agency time.

The planner, Jon Steel says in Truth, Lies & Advertising, is the agency’s “conscience” (interchangeable, he writes, with “pain in the ass”), whose job it is to hold that agency - from planners themselves to account management to creative - accountable, making sure it sticks to its true task: saying the right things to consumers.

Not to the agency up the road. Not to the creative director who bombed your last idea. Not to the jury president.

To the person your client needs to buy their product.

And that little inconvenience is probably how “conscience” became “pain in the ass”.

Creatives need to take stock, says marketer

Louise Marsland  1 Nov 2005

Create work with the consumer in mind

In advertising, we’re tempted to create art. But art just needs to look good. What we make has to work a bit harder.

If we produce more work with consumers, and not juries, in mind, we’ll deliver tangible business results. Clients will trust us more. And if they trusted us more, they’d trust creativity more, too. And then they might just be more confident signing off bold creative work. Work that has every chance of going on to win awards — because efficacy doesn’t demand that creativity be sacrificed.

Just look at John Lewis, who’s won multiple creative and efficacy awards balancing the two.

Explaining how John Lewis won Grand Prix at the IPA Effectiveness Awards in 2016, Les Binet describes how work that consumers and (most of) the advertising industry love took the department store chain from a slightly dull, expected choice to one of Britain’s most-loved brands. The kind of brand that gets people to actually make sure they’re in front of the TV so that they can see its Christmas ad the first time it airs.

If you keep doing that you will go blind

Damon Stapleton  20 Mar 2019

In four years, this kind of work (strategically superb, creatively excellent, beautifully produced — but with the consumer always at the centre) increased sales by 37%, at a time where most of their competitors were struggling, with market share increasing substantially as well. And, for every pound that John Lewis spent on advertising, they got back eight in profit. Not income. Profit.

Don't compromise on effectiveness or evaluation

Binet calls this kind of work “the stuff that’s both winning at Cannes and that your mum loves”.

And there’s a reason John Lewis and Adam&Eve do it so well.

They don’t compromise on effectiveness or evaluation. (They don’t pre-test the work, either. But that’s for a different day).

Great advertising should be measured in hard business terms. And agencies (as well as the people who work there) should be judged by the difference their campaign makes to the client’s bottom line, and not only on the awards it wins.

Creativity is subjective; numbers are not.