Do ad awards reward successful campaigns or creativity?

Grant Shippey, CEO of Amorphous believes that awards are often deemed a crucial barometer for the success of an advertising agency, but the reality is that they render such agencies grossly inefficient and can even seriously undermine the future of creatives they employ.

How advertising is judged

"Advertising awards are given for one of two reasons. Firstly, for originality and cleverness by a group of peers, who are deemed to have sufficient experience to make such an assessment. Yet the views of these judges do not mirror the views of the markets serviced by the advertisements.

"So, when one thinks about why ads are made, there is a clear disconnect - the business wants to promote a market response in order to sell more products, yet the criteria upon which the awards are assessed is based purely on originality, cleverness and artistic merit. It does not necessarily follow that artistic ads generate the desired responses."

According to Andre Steenekamp, chief operations officer at Amorphous, the second reason awards are given is usually for good results; but rarely does this happen independent of artistic merit. In advertising, these results usually have to be shown to have been achieved by the advertising specifically and not through other factors such as the Christmas season.

"While this prejudices campaigns run at high season periods, the award also praises campaigns that exhibit a grotesque failure of marketing proper: any marketing director who relies solely on promotion to achieve success is not doing his or her job properly. For example, Apex may award great ads, but it does so at the expense of great marketing - case studies must show that only the ads were responsible for the results yet advertising is really in the field of marketing," explains Steenekamp.

Putting creatives at risk

Shippey says it is for these reasons that awards often make agencies inefficient. Marketers often do not see much value in 'award driven work'.

For an advertising agency, the holy grail becomes selling potential award winning work to clients for their campaigns; but for clients it becomes an irritation as it wastes their time, puts enormous pressure on the agency in working overtime to meet deadlines and creatives end up working overtime on non-campaign, award work.

Furthermore, awards can seriously undermine the futures of creatives. "Awards are assessed neither by the market nor the client, meaning creatives tune themselves to the insights and paradigms of a small group of people and almost never gain a deep understanding of the businesses they serve or what it takes for a solid, 360, more-than-just-advertising campaign."

Shippey says awards are a farcical representation of merit, as companies have no idea which agency produces the most effective work only which is the most awarded. "Until the measurement of campaign results and brand awareness are added to the mix in terms of evaluation criteria, providing credibility and transparency to the process; awards remain a useless barometer for ad campaigns."

"Agencies should be tracking every measurable point against the set campaign objectives and continually tweak them until those objectives are surpassed, whether that is through actual sales or pure awareness," concludes Steenekamp.