With awards the more you get, the more you get
Following recent controversy surrounding entries to the Cannes Lions awards Eaon Pritchard argues until we have a better way to evaluate the merits of agencies than awards all agencies will be highly incentivised to do whatever it takes to win .
Advertising’s outcomes are notoriously hard to measure. Which is why in advertising agencies, we love to measure outputs instead.
Agency outputs (ie creativity, ingenuity, technical wizardry and planning cleverness) are far easier to evaluate than the contributions that the work agencies do has to actual business outcomes.
Despite this clients will often clamour for performance based remuneration deals from their agencies. Some agencies even claim to offer this. How they can do this is unclear.
I’m oft to remark that if t’were possible then Y&R London should still be receiving a performance based royalty from Heinz Beans for the work of their then deputy creative director, a young Maurice Drake who penned the famous tagline ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’ over a couple of pints of a lunchtime back in 1967.
Maybe they are, who knows.
The fact is that the effects of great advertising often take a long time to unfold. And many other factors other than the advertising will affect brand performance. (The effects of shit advertising tend to reveal themselves much sooner, of course).
So when, among its peers/competitors, agencies performance can, for the most part, only be evaluated in terms of the creative output, then the agencies themselves are highly incentivised to squeeze the juice out of those outputs regardless of whether those outputs can be said to have contributed to business outcomes.
Even the planners’ effectiveness awards, known as Effies, are no more precise and for the most part only describe shorter-term effectiveness, and often forced to rely on qual/quant research of highly dubious methodology (such is the ineptitude of our market research cousins, but that’s another topic for another time).
If you have made it this far you will know that I am leading up to some commentary on the great ad scam kerfuffle of recent weeks.
For those who have been in hibernation, it has come to light that a few Australian press ads entered in the Lions at Cannes this year had a somewhat ‘limited’ distribution.
While the ads met with the criteria for entry, it has been argued that running one time in a suburban newspaper of little consequence is not fair play.
There’s plenty of opinion around this. Several articles have been written, each receiving large numbers of comments. I’m not going to add further opinion, but perhaps offer some thoughts towards the beginnings of an explanation.
From personal experience I’ve played in two broad camps, both highly incentivised to pursue award-winning activities.
In big network agencies, consistently receiving global and local awards was an absolute imperative.
At [agency X], for example, every Monday morning we would roll in to work and be curious to find out which awards the agency had won over the weekend. And every significant piece of work seemed to have its creative award entry case study video constructed almost in parallel to development of the campaign itself.
To my knowledge there was never anything cooked up specifically to try and manipulate creative awards, however every piece of work was evaluated internally for its creative award potential, and certain pro-bono work was often considered for the same reasons.
There’s nothing hokey about this approach. It’s correct.
However, if a major award show came and went where the agency performed poorly in terms of metal then one could feel the pressure to return to winning ways a soon as possible.
In this environment, where success is routine, then winning becomes table stakes. In smaller agencies or even decent sized indies there is a different sort of pressure.
To level the playing field then in these agencies have to look that little bit harder to find the opportunities to generate outputs that can stand up against the outputs of agencies with more resources and better clients. One could describe the situation as a kind of agency double jeopardy.
Smaller agencies get hit twice. They have fewer, less sophisticated and resource rich clients, who also tend to be less loyal. This provides the smaller agency with plenty incentive to ‘maximise’ to then possibly manipulate outputs in order to portray their creative abilities in the best way.
Because no agency is going to attract new sophisticated clients with a portfolio of mediocre work. By hook or by crook you need to get the goods.
Now, we are aware that the agencies which have come under scrutiny in the Aussie case are DDB, Saatchi’s and to a slightly lesser degree JWT. All are outposts of big global networks, not small by any stretch.
However, the Aussie market is somewhat peculiar inasmuch as just about every global network has an office in at least two (often 3 or more) of the major cities.Everyone is scrapping with everyone else.
In the absence of any way to meaningfully measure clients’ business outcomes, the way the industry evaluates itself in the only way it can. Though outputs – in the form of award shows.
The volume and quality of new business an agency attracts is explicitly connected to the volume and quality of the awards they accrue.
The more you get, the more you get.
Without making any judgement call on what-is-or-is-not-scam perhaps some clarity comes from knowing this about our own foibles as an industry.
And perhaps it might not be a bad thing to put this year’s what-is-or-is-not-scam debate to bed and get on with next years award winners. As an industry perhaps we suffer from a collective actor-observer bias.
When we judge our own agency’s behaviour, we are the actors, and perhaps we are more likely to attribute our actions as a response to peculiarities of the situational factors of the industry; than to any general sense of our integrity or lack of.
However, when explaining the behaviour of others (our competitor agencies), we are far more inclined to attribute their scam ads to their overall cheating-bastard disposition rather than to any of the situational factors that influenced us.
Eaon Pritchard is strategic planning director at Red Jelly Australia
True. Creative awards are a pretence about the fraternity of the industry around friendly competition. The reality is more like a war.
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I was part of a screening for a agency pitch for a top 10 spending client.
The criteria were: Relevant category experience of key people-especially creative, tenure of their service and stability of the agency.
No one asked about awards.
The belief that awards somehow lead to new businesses is a fallacy touted by award networks who already have them by the truck loads and award organizers.
Awards are like huge boobs.
Yes they will get you noticed.
Some are born with them.
Others pay to get them fixed.
Bottomline is that it’ss no measure of much milk they can produce.
Which I believe is what nature intended.
If agencies keep crying for partnership and respect, stop behaving like eye candy at a bar.
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Ad agencies need Awards to get noticed, to get on pitch list. Creatives, planners, designers need awards to get promoted, to move on in their career. The advertising world created the need that certain people are criticising right now.
How could we be judge otherwise? On pure effectiveness? If it was the case my EDM offering movie tickets for a mobile operator will have won gold in 2009… ( it did won an obscure effectiveness award )
Like Terry Savage said: “It is the Cannes International Festival of Creativity as clearly headlined in the name of the event.”
So get creative.
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“You’ve gotta be in it to win it.” (The Rouse Hill Times that is.)
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Can’t wait for the piece on the ‘ineptitude of market researchers’…strong words, sounds fascinating.
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@Welcome, u r 100% correct
“The belief that awards somehow lead to new businesses is a fallacy touted by award networks who already have them by the truck loads and award organizers”.
as an advertiser with a brain, i pay no attention to awards – just the smarts of the team who’ll be on my job
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One thing is for sure, awards nights are all about getting drunk and abusing the competition.
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@mark@quirk mea culpa, a sweeping generalisation. There are some in mrx doing a good scientific job. Just not many.
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@Eaon. No argument from me on that. Even though I’m a market researcher, I am always – seriously – happy to hear other people’s criticism. So, I’d still like to hear your thoughts!
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We like to think we are the centre of the world but AUS/NZ makes up three fifths of F all for revenue in global networks and the real players in the game need the guys at Saatchi / DDB / JWT Sydney to increase the clout on a global level in NY or London.
To NY, Australia is Minnesota, a test market at best.
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