How many people do you need to create a winning campaign?

Here comes the advertising awards season. But awards ceremonies can be boring, so here's a tip to make the parade of case presentations more exciting: See if you can count how many people were involved in the working groups. I bet you won't be able to do it before the picture on the screen changes.

I was at Sweden's equivalent of the Effie Awards almost a year ago. I entertained myself by counting the people in the campaign teams. But I had no chance of keeping up. There were just too many people involved. This made me curious to check the entries afterwards to see how many people were actually involved.

It turned out that, on average, 25 people were involved in the nominated campaigns. This may already seem like a lot, but several additional agencies were often involved in the campaign work without the number of people listed, so the average is actually even higher.

The beefiest campaign team had managed to involve 117 named individuals. The team presentation alone required two densely written slides.

Having many people involved is obviously expensive, but I would argue that it also leads to poorer communication.

Here are some concrete consequences of large campaign teams:

- More administration and coordination is required.

- Large meetings are required, which wastes a lot of time.

- The risk of communication gaps and misunderstandings increases significantly.

- There is duplication of effort and unused production.

- It becomes unclear who steers, who gives opinions and who actually approves.

- There is friction between 'competing' specialists and agencies.

- More opinions are presented, leading to more costly changes.

- Strong ideas get diluted as many people think and change.

- The result is fragmented as many people interpret and adapt the main idea.

- Messages easily get out of sync between channels.

- The proportion of the budget that can be spent on media is reduced.

The list of names in competition entries is not a scientific foundation for how many people contributed to the final agency bill or clocked up hours in the marketing department. It could be more. It could be less. But the number does indicate that, in most cases, the teams are large.

And both we and many others in the industry believe that the number of people involved in marketing has also increased in recent years. Our major study, The Marketing Department 23, confirms this trend.

The growth of campaign teams and increased complexity is due to the increased number of channels, specialist roles and agencies. But also because marketing departments have built up a parallel pipeline of in-house expertise.

When the marketing department shows up for a briefing with an entourage of their creatives and Google experts, there is only one way out for the agencies - to mirror or exceed the client's range of expertise. Soon, the number of people involved in a normal campaign team has swelled to the size of an entire class at any famous marketing school. And in some cases, apparently closer to an entire year group.

Larger marketing departments often employ a smaller army of specialist agencies. The agency cake is then cut into such small pieces that agencies find it difficult to feed on them. Not surprisingly, many agencies continue to expand their menu of specialist skills in an attempt to grab a bigger slice of the pie.

Unfortunately, the pie doesn't get bigger because more specialists are involved. There is a limit to how much a campaign can cost. Many agencies have seen their profitability erode.

Regardless of the team structure, a campaign needs to be cohesive. If several agencies are working on the same account, the question is, who is the creative lead?

No one would be surprised if that role ends up with the agency that pays the bill, owns multiple channels and has its creatives. Suddenly, a marketing department is in creative competition with the agencies it uses. The situation is not always smooth.

So, how do you achieve a leaner team structure? The key, as always, is to start with clear objectives, prioritize the marketing work and then let that guide activities and channel choices. Don't get distracted by the jungle of possibilities.

Tough prioritization makes it much easier to sort out what needs to be done, how it should be done, and who needs to be involved.

Don't be surprised if you end up with only a handful of channels and a compact team that follows Jeff Bezos' famous 2-pizza rule: A campaign team shouldn't be larger than they can share two large overtime pizzas on the evening the next winner of the award is finalized.

Voila! A sharp and manageable team with plenty of creative freedom. A team that can be profitable for the agency without costing the marketing director a fortune.

And maybe I'll manage to read the names of your campaign team at next year’s award ceremonies.

This column was originally published in Swedish in the marketing trade magazine Resumé .