Mumbrella Awards shortlist – and why we’ll miss the missing agencies
We today reveal our 2018 Mumbrella Awards shortlist. But there are a few media agencies missing. Mumbrella content director Tim Burrowes explains how we’ve dealt with the MFA boycott of local publishers.
We today publish the shortlist for this year’s Mumbrella Awards.
You’ll find it at the end of this article.
At first glance, it’s the usual list of great agencies, top brands and high-achieving media companies. Indeed, I think it may be our strongest ever mix of creative agencies, and certainly features our most competitive shortlist yet for Marketing Team of the Year.
Clemenger Melbourne, CHE Proximity, The Monkeys and Cummins & Partners are among those with the strongest showings.
Looks like a few people filed Arthur Sadoun’s Marcel memo in the round filing cabinet under their desk. Or did their clients ‘happily’ submit on their behalf? Amietiés
Or….. you discovered Atomic had lied on their entries and did not cast them out. Yes, you didn’t award them anything but you also did not disqualify them. That pissed a lot of people off and will have been a contributing factor to the boycott decision.
This entire article has a really odd tone – both self-aggrandising and whiny at the same time.
“it’s not our fault, we’re the best” *angrily stomps feet*
Well, maybe you need to acknowledge that your awards took the easy way out and rather than doing the right thing and publicly disqualifying Atomic for bare faced lies, instead allowed them to remain officially shortlisted in the categories in which they had supplied false data.
Hi James,
Thanks for the feedback. You’ll see that in previous articles we disclosed in some detail the process we went through with Atomic’s entries.
That included sharing with our jury the information about questionable claims that was available to us. The jury used that to ask specific questions, and as a result of those answers, chose to recognise other winners.
As we revealed some time ago, we also invited the juries to vote on disqualification and after much debate they chose not to. Indeed, in one category, Atomic survived disqualification by four votes to three.
Having created an independent jury process, and empowered them to vote in an informed way, it would have been wrong for us to then overrule our jury. If that pisses you off, then I’ll have to live with that.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
“And in the spirit of full disclosure, that’s out of just two entries.”
And now we know who are KPI-ed on awards.
Think about the business equation Tim. You’re a small-mid sized agency. Entering awards is incredibly costly in head hours, running into the thousands. It takes minds off paying work, then you start to play the numbers game and say, enter 3 categories. It’s like a gambling addiction, and it gets worse. The winning bet *might* mean you gain new business. But it might not too. Who do you let go when you don’t win to manage the cost/loss? The junior who had high hopes, now dashed? How do you manage the sense of let-down among staff? How do you justify all that effort, for what? An award that’s completely forgotten a week later? An awards that looks like narcissism to your clients, because it is? Awards are a healthy little earner for media brands like Mumbrella, but frankly putting that time and effort into winning and retaining new business is a far better bet.
I think we need to cut down on the more subjective awards. I’ve seen “people” and “culture” awards manipulated by massaging staff survey results and including schemes that only 1 or 2 people participated.. Let’s just stick to the work from now on. And effective work at that.