Anonymous confessions from un-awarded creatives
Advertising awards are a celebration of the best. But this can have a two-fold effect, in that it can make some people feel – well, the worst. When you win an award, you feel on top of the world. But how do you feel when you haven’t won any? The following confessions are the result of an anonymous survey, to get a sense of how the un-awarded really feel. This piece was first published on Gabberish.
Awards make me feel stressed. I feel pressure to win them, even they I know it’s not a real measure of the work was effective, smart, creative, or original. I also feel pressure to win them to advance my career, however winning doesn’t seem to make a huge difference. Not winning seems to matter more.
– Copywriter
I feel inspired and motivated by them, but I hate feeling pressured to win them and I get the feeling that they’re also the emperor’s new clothes – agencies want us to think they’re important so they can pay us less. They want us to think awards are payment enough.
– Creative director
It seems like a “right time, right place” kind of thing. I’m not ashamed I haven’t won more, but I’d like the opportunity to.
– Copywriter
Diddums
Says the dude (because only a bloke would be so petty and bitchy) who probably won an award for best use of a star burst in a POS. And yes, POS has more than one meaning.
imagine if those within other departments in an agency won individual awards.
I realised quite early in my career that awards were a problem.
It cost me too much money to frame them and the only way i could afford all the trophies was when my company paid for it.
After my third year, I just clipped them together with a fat paper clip and stopped bothering with treating them as validation.
Awards are like smoking.
People think you’re cool.
But deep down you’re killing yourself.
And wasting a lot of money.
Unless the mysterious copywriter that came up with the line ‘even they I know’ is some kind of forlorn poet trying to invoke the influence of all their past lives on their present self, they are lucky to have a job let alone contemplating all the awards they will never win.
It’s an anonymous survey, mate. You think all copywriters give the same care and professional attention to everything they ever write?
A golfer doesn’t practice their golf swing by trying to miss the ball and estimating how far it would have gone.
So when a copywriter is both practicing their craft and commenting on it, and they want what they’re saying to be taken seriously they should probably try and hit the ball.
Please have marketing and CEO client confessions about advertising awards next!
Awards have completely lost their way. When I was younger I used to hold them on a pedestal. Winning them meant something, and was usually accompanied with a pay rise. Then, the awards became a proxy for the pay rise (“Work here because you’ll get to do lots of award-winning work”). These days, I’ve come to realise that outside of a very small group of people, awards count for fuck-all. They are only useful to help convince insecure potential bosses who don’t know good work from bad, headhunters who don’t really know what they’re doing, or bosses who are under pressure to deliver awards as part of their KPIs. I now see awards, and the people who value them, very differently.