And the Award Goes To...

Newsletter #26 | And the Award Goes To...

It’s awards season, and Hollywood’s biggest stars are set to grace the Oscars red carpet this weekend ahead of the 96th Academy Awards.?

But while the spotlight will be on those collecting awards on stage, attention is also placed on those films and actors deemed to have been ‘snubbed’ in the nomination process. Despite rave reviews, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal have been left out of the nominee lists for their roles in All of Us Strangers. Greta Gerwig might have made the most successful movie of 2023, but she failed to make the cut in the Best Director category – a slightly bitter irony given Barbie’s core message.?

Winning an Academy Award has delivered an “Oscars bump” for films. 29% of US adults still say they would be more likely to watch a movie they haven’t seen before if it won an Oscar. However, the impact of the “Oscars bump” has been in steady decline for decades.?

In 1999, Shakespeare in Love received 13 Oscars nominations, and responded (in its 10th week of release), by adding more than 1,000 theaters and climbing in the box office from $36 million to $100 million. This year, Poor Things’ 11 nominations translated into only an additional $4 million in box office receipts.?

The rise in streaming services means that the release of films follows a very different pattern today, which impacts the potential effect of award-nominations. But it also points to a separate debate: is award-winning work necessarily more effective??

Creativity + Effectiveness

This question seems to have been weighing on the advertising world as well as the film industry. WARC recently published an updated instalment of the Health of Creativity Report (first released in 2021), spurred on, as Amy Rodgers commented, by the “many studies proving how creativity supercharges effectiveness [...] We wanted to see if the status of effectiveness of creatively awarded campaigns had changed.”

The report combined WARC rankings data from 2015 to 2022, looking at the intersection between creative award winners and effectiveness award winners. As Rodgers and David Tiltman explored on the WARC podcast, this amounted to just over 4,000 creative ideas.?

The findings? 20% of all ideas awarded for creativity are also awarded for effectiveness. This is despite the fact that the chances of winning either award are tiny. In short, if your work is recognised for its creativity, it’s more likely to be awarded for effectiveness.?

But the question remains: how do we close the gap between excellent creative and effective creative? 100% of the best creative ideas should be effective, so their potential impact can be realized, and all work should be developed with both creativity and effectiveness in mind.?

The Tyranny of "Or"

This speaks to Mark Ritson ’s argument for “bothism”. Ritson’s view was informed by Jim Collins' book Built to Last, which explored the successful habits of visionary companies. One key characteristic Collins identified was the refusal of these companies to oppress themselves with ‘tyranny of the or’ which pushes people to believe that “things must be either A or B but not both”.??

For Ritson, marketing is fundamentally a contranym, a word or phrase that exhibits two oppositional meanings. An example of a contranym is transparent - which can mean both invisible and obvious.?

Marketing means “to understand, listen and take stock”, but marketing also means “to target, communicate and change”. And these two opposing meanings are interlinked. One must feed the other.?

Creativity is rooted in the first meaning: understanding consumers and building work that appeals to their sensibilities and needs. Effectiveness falls under the second bracket: how creative ideas are translated into ads that change consumer behavior.?

As Adam Morgan pointed out at Most Contagious New York, it’s certainly possible to be effective without being creative, but it will cost you more.?

At the same event, Morgan Flatley offered some insight as to how her teams think about building content that covers both creative and effective bases. For Flatley the key is instilling a common language among teams for how they talk about creativity and evaluate creativity, and using common tools to measure creative impact.?

For Bayer’s CMO Patricia Corsi ???? ???????? , this common language has been the Creative Quality Score. “We can look across the board and have one consistent conversation… helping us to better use our investments, to better connect with consumers, and improve our brand equities.”?

As marketers begin their own awards season countdown – Cannes Lions is but a mere 3 months away – bringing together creativity and effectiveness in harmony should be top of the agenda.?

Thanks for reading!