Taking home the trophy
In a feature that first appeared in Encore, Brooke Hemphill speaks to award winners and the jurors who chose them to find out the best way to maximise your awards haul.
The importance of awards to the communications industry is evident by the placement of trophies in the offices of agencies across the country. At the headquarters of one Sydney organisation, even the wallpaper has pictures of Cannes Lions on it and you’d be hard pressed to find a desk or shelf that isn’t sporting a One Show gold pencil – or 10.
Ralph van Dijk, founder of creative sound agency Eardrum and winner of multiple awards including Sirens, Lions and AWARD awards, says: “Awards are important for business and personal reasons. We get work from advertisers, and their agencies, and advertisers are motivated by effectiveness – they know that creative, original thinking in their ads gives them more cut through. Our award success gives them confidence in that, but then you’ve got the agencies and they need awards to improve their profile and get on pitch lists.” That’s clearly the business reason and as for the personal, van Dijk says: “Truly creative people aren’t usually motivated by money. We prefer acknowledgment and appreciation for the things that we make. If we were motivated by money you’d ask the ECD to scrap the awards budget and just pay us all a Christmas bonus but I’ve never heard a creative team say that.” Michael Ritchie of production house Revolver, whose awards haul includes Cannes Lions, trophies from the UK’s D&AD awards, a CLIO or two, One Show pencils and AWARD awards, agrees that award shows are important for the industry. He says: “They’ve become more important than ever because they’re an aggregator of the work that we all do. There’s so much scope to the different kinds of things that we’re doing in the marketing and commercial communications area that award shows have become really useful in actually pulling all that stuff together in one sphere. They really are more useful than they’ve ever been.”
Elsewhere in the business, a film and television industry figure who was involved in this year’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards says: “In an age where there’s so much noise, a respected organisation holding up prime examples of the best of their industry is fantastic.”
Perhaps the only people that will tell you awards are not important are those that don’t have them. So how can you change that and get some metal on the mantle?
BE IN IT TO WIN IT
Obviously, in order to win awards, you need to actually enter your work in the first place.
“The first step is bloody apply for it because in several categories this year, some outstanding contenders didn’t even put in a nomination, which makes it very hard for them to win,” says the AACTA awards insider.
The next step to maximise your chances of winning involves doing your homework to ensure you’re entering the correct category. “At the AACTAs this year Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell was nominated in the comedy category while shows like Gruen and the Chaser’s Hamster Wheel were nominated for light entertainment and that was purely because they decided to enter in those categories. So you end up comparing apples and oranges and in fact you have oranges sitting in two categories that are not allowed to be compared to each other,” says the industry insider.
PRESENTATION ISN’T EVERYTHING
The next step in entering award shows is to select the work you plan to submit, a task made all the more difficult for categories related to television series when entrants are asked to submit just a couple of episodes from the show to people that may or may not have seen the series.
“People trip over themselves to follow the rules on these committees so they won’t judge a show based on something they’ve seen outside of the nominated episodes. Choose your best ones but also try to choose episodes that will let someone that hasn’t seen your series access it which is a tough thing to bring together. Episode one, then your best episode, probably isn’t the worst idea in the world,” says the AACTA insider.
With your best work selected, it’s time to put together your application. While many media and ad agencies have dedicated personnel to take care of such admin, this is less likely in other sectors of the business.
Isabel Wartho, marketing and communications manager for Publishers Australia, whose annual awards recognise excellence in custom magazine publishing, business to business titles and consumer magazines, says: “Read the rubric of the awards criteria and answer the questions.” Wartho also encourages entrants to put their best foot forward but cautions against going over the top. She says some of the entries they received for their awards in late 2012 were “over engineered”. “We did have to give our judges fairly strict instructions before the whole process began. Some people tried to submit shareholders reports or fancy presentations that they have done,” says Wartho.
Her colleague Annie Wylie adds: “Bells and whistles don’t count for a lot. Our judges found when people complied 20-page glossy applications, it really didn’t affect the way they looked at it.”
A recent bone of contention in the advertising awards process is case study videos. Leo Burnett Melbourne’s creative director Andrew Woodhead recently suggested in an opinion piece for Encore that creatives were spending more time and money compiling case study videos than the work itself. Eardum’s van Dijk, who heads to Cannes in June to head up the radio jury, says case study videos are also starting to pop up in the radio category. “It becomes a slightly uneven playing field. You can make a very compelling TV ad promoting a radio ad and suddenly that’s been elevated. You go, ‘wait a minute we’re judging the piece here’,” he says.
INSIDE THE JURY ROOM
So you have submitted your entry and the judging process has begun. In order to maximise your chances, it pays to know what juries are looking for. Matt Buchanan, managing director of PR agency One Green Bean, was a judge at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2012. His criteria for judging was simple. He says: “Insight is one of the big things. A campaign grounded in innovative or interesting insight. The main thing we all talked about at Cannes was effectiveness. Did the work deliver on the business ambition, the commercial objectives of the client? Those are the big things and it goes without saying creativity is at the heart of everything.”
Revolver’s Ritchie, who has most recently judged the craft category at the AWARD awards and Spikes Asia, says commercial objectives are less important for his judging process. “You’ve got to look at what the work has done, if it’s done something differently, how it has made an idea work more strongly than that idea might have otherwise worked,” he says. When van Dijk briefs his international jury in June to choose the best radio work from around the world, he will be giving them simple guidelines. “The two-word criteria for me is relevant cleverness. It’s something that’s surprising, original, but relevant. Relevant for the brand, the product, but also the medium. There’s lots of original thinking going on, and I judge a lot of awards and hear a lot of original thinking, but unless it’s relevant, it’s great art but not great advertising,” he says.
That’s the intellectualised version of what judges are looking for but there’s another element involved entirely − feeling.
Van dijk says: “Creative people can tell. It’s a visceral response. You feel something. You don’t just look at the work and go, ‘oh yeah, that’s pretty good’. It makes you feel something in the back of your neck.”
And bearing in mind that the judging process often has multiple steps − for judges of most categories at the Cannes Lions there is a round of prejudging where in some cases thousands of pieces of work need to be viewed before arriving in the south of France − the winning work will be seen numerous times by the jury and an effective measure of whether it’s a winner is often if it can still elicit that response.
Criteria aside, Ritchie says: “Usually the best stuff floats to the surface.”
While there is little an award entrant can do about it, there is also the make up and politics of the jury room to contend with.
“You’ve got people who are all members of the industry and you end up with a ‘horse designed by committee’ scenario,” says our AACTA awards insider who believes often the work that wins is the least objectionable to all parties in the room.
In the case of international award shows like the Cannes Lions, there has been talk in previous years of ‘block voting’ where jurors are pressured to select certain pieces of work in an attempt to elevate a particular agency or agency network.
And at the most basic level, there is the challenge of conveying cultural nuances such as humour and local personalities to judges from other countries. Perhaps the best way to improve your chances of success is to get yourself inside a jury room. Eardrum’s van Dijk says: “It takes an awful lot of time and I judge a lot of awards each year but it just informs everything – standards of craft, casting, ideas, what works, what doesn’t. What the jury room reacts to and why. It’s extremely useful.”
So you’ve entered your work and it’s made its way through the judging process to be shortlisted for an award. You bust out your best suit or pop on a frock and head to the awards.
As anyone that has been to an awards show knows, your luck could fall either way. You’ll either be heading home empty handed before the ceremony even finishes or celebrating your success into the small hours.
But should you be lucky enough to score a win, One Green Bean’s Buchanan has some sage advice for the big moment: “Keep your speech short and always thank the client.”
This feature first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visit encore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.
