Invisible Brand

Lucian camp on the dangers of both giving and receiving awards

In the end there were thirteen of us – four from agencies of one sort or another, five from client-side marketing roles, a marketing consultant, a journalist, a media man, and me allegedly chairing the proceedings. By any standards, we were a diverse bunch: aged from late 20s to late 50s, reasonably evenly divided between men and women, some with ackgrounds very much on the creative side of the industry, others much more technical, left-brain marketers.

Our mission, over the course of an eight-hour session in a posh London hotel, was to judge the 2005 Money Marketing Financial Advertising Awards, the premier scheme for financial services communications. Specifically, we wouldn’t be allowed out until we’d decided on the gold, silver and bronze award winners across a range of nine categories including direct marketing; television, radio and print advertising; and the two prestige categories, Campaign of the Year (Consumer) and Campaign of the Year (IFA). Of course this is great fun. But that’s not the important point. The important and interesting point, given the diversity of the judges, is how astonishingly easy we found it to agree on about 95% of the prizewinners.

Hands up for winners

Without boring you too much with the details of the judging process, in the first stage all the work in a particular category is laid out in a room; the judges wander around looking at it for fifteen minutes or so; then we band together as a posse; Money Marketing’s awards queen, Jenny Lowe, holds up each entry in turn; and if any judge wants the entry to go onto the short list for detailed consideration in the second stage, he or she puts a hand up.

Yes, OK, I know, that was boring. But the point is that you put your hand up purely on the basis of your own judgement, without peer pressure. And at risk of oversimplifying a little bit, the way it went was that out of several hundred entries, about 70% picked up no votes at all, about 25% picked up the odd vote here and there and when we saw the other 5% pretty much all of us put up our hands right away.

And then, when it came to the second stage of the judging, not only did 95% of the prizes go to work from among that initial 5%, but also in the vast majority of cases we agreed unanimously or almost unanimously on which work should win which prize.

We even agreed unanimously on our bravest decision, in the radio category, that Nationwide’s work stood so far ahead of everyone else’s that it should win the gold, silver and bronze awards.

There were a few occasions when we weren’t unanimous, but most of these were for the technical reason that judges aren’t allowed to vote for, or speak for, their own agency’s or company’s work. For example, none of cchm:ping’s handsome crop of awards – gold for best press ad, silver for best consumer campaign, silver for best TV commercial and bronze for best direct mail pack – was unanimous. But that was simply because I could not vote for them.

Hands down for originality?

But anyway, my point – and I think it’s a really intriguing one – is that it’s weird how easy it is to agree on the best stuff in retrospect, in the cold light of the awards jury room, when it seems to be so hard to do it at the time, in the heat of the client/agency meeting.

I don’t want to get into standard agency whinge mode. Well, all right, maybe I do, just a bit. But the universal perception of people in agencies is that very nearly all their best and bravest and most original ideas get shot down by their clients: that whereas awards juries (rightly) recognise the importance of stand-out and involvement and memorability, clients buying campaigns from agencies (wrongly) are fearful and suspicious of these same qualities and avoid them like the plague.

What do I think? Well, as a Libran, I take a balanced view. I think that not all great work is great for every brand: if an agency showed, say, a great Volvo idea to Volkswagen then VW would be right to turn it down. I think that when agencies show really great big ideas that are right for the brand to their senior clients, I think most of the senior clients spot it at once, thank the agency warmly for its efforts and put the work into production straight away.

But lower down the food chain, I think there are far too many middle and junior managers who, in these risk-averse times, have somehow got it into their heads that their role is to reject and remove every element of their agencies’ work that shows the faintest trace of life, or originality, or humour, or controversy, or any of the attributes that help stuff not only to win awards, but also – more often than not – to be included amongst the tiny, tiny proportion of financial services communications that actually broke through and got noticed by somebody.

The Final Judgement

’s the point. For all the teasing about agencies’ love of awards, the stuff that wins is generally the stuff that people have seen and enjoyed – and have been motivated by. The truth is that by far the biggest risk that most financial communications run is the risk of sinking without trace – of burning money to little or no measurable purpose. Oscar Wilde, as usual, got it right. The only thing worse than winning the Money Marketing Financial Advertising Awards… yes, you know the rest of it.