It turns out the award I really wanted to win wasn't an award.
Like many advertising creatives, I really cared about winning awards. I needed affirmation that I wasn’t a hack.
Though I am a long way from being one of our industry's "super stars", over the years I have managed to accumulate a few of those precious bowls, pencils, certificates, et al. But whenever I was lucky enough to land one of those mythical pelts—a One Show pencil or Webby Award—I felt something odd: nothing. It always mystified me.
But something strange started happening over the last few years. I finally started to occasionally get those electric jolts of joy that I had assumed I would feel when someone handed me a shiny trophy. But instead, they were coming from something like this:
When the CTR benchmark is.8%, this is what “Best of Show” looks like.
I hadn’t realized it, but this is what I was waiting for. Not someone’s opinion that our work was good, but inconvertible proof that it was. Just this morning I learned that a campaign we recently launched is getting average video view times of 45 seconds — at a cost of 1￠ per view. That honestly felt better than any “prestigious” award I’ve ever won.
Creative award shows feel like they are deciding which horse is the fastest by using a focus group. They gather a group of people together who are "experts" in horses. They examine the horses, compare the horses, discuss the horses, and then decide which horse would win the race. Then they give it a trophy.
How silly does that feel when our “horses” are being put into actual, measurable races every single day?
Look, we won the race!
Not coincidentally, we’ve been slowly losing enthusiasm for entering awards shows. With every passing week they feel more and more like paying people a whole lot of money to guess something that we can know for free.
We used to believe that great creative work generated results.
Now we know it.
Founder / Creative Director at Courage
5 年Well said, Alec. I'd like to think that the more creative an ad is, the harder it works. But there are also plenty of examples of work (anyone remember the hilarious Outpost.com campaign?) that swept the best shows yet failed to move the needle.
Freelance Creative Director/Writer
5 年Nicely written. But I’ve always felt the correlation between awards and salary increases was really what it was all about.
8th Grade Math Teacher
5 年2003 Hatch was my undoing with the ad world. I watched a now-defunct agency be celebrated for a ton of fake work. Their phony work that ran in some penny-savor and never had to endure the scorn of a real client. Another monster-sized agency won a ton of awards for some tiny pro-bono accounts, none that were actually paying them! A 3rd agency won a lot of big awards on big real accounts, but the catch was every single account they won on had already moved to a different agency. I recall a client of nail being so unimpressed with our awards that he asked us if we would discount the work since we were getting famous for it.?
8th Grade Math Teacher
5 年Meanwhile, some really, smart, super-effective work of Nail's got an honorable mention...I think we kept it in the bathroom for a year. At that point, I was like why on earth do we keep handing over our hard-earned money to support this fake world? I recall reading Luke Sullivan ( think it was him) who weighed in on it saying, "Awards are what keeps a creative team trying to refine, that headline for the 50th time when the client would be glad to write if for you in the meeting in 3 minutes. An AD's fear of an award show judge is what makes them try the headline in the 100th different font...It's really what makes coal form into a diamond...Of course one of my favorite Luke's Laws: outlast the idiots!
Founder of OpenEye - Insightful Marketing Solutions
5 年Such an 'Alec' thing to say. If I gave out awards - I'd have one for you!!