Our industry is constantly getting criticised for our obsession with Award. "It's just friends patting friends of the back.", "It's all scam anyway.", "You're just doing this for awards." - you've heard it all before but now I'm beginning to believe it.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's great to win awards (I am a creative after all) but after my fair share of Loeries I think the industry has completely lost the plot.
First of all why do we insist that advertising be creative? Simply put a creative idea resonates more with the target audience, which in turns sells more products for the client. I believe it, creatives believe it, but sadly clients (and many client service people don't). No, they think the only reason we do creative work is to win awards and Feed Our Ego's. So, we all lose.
This belief is clearly hurting our industry. (Have you switched on the TV lately? How about the radio?) But who's to blame. I hate to say it, but I think we are. As long as we as an industry continue to perpetuate these stereotypes clients are doomed to keep bombing our work.
For example, I don't think 'Feed Your Ego' is probably the best message to associate with our local awards industry. It's like doing an ad campaign for our clients that says: "Buy creative work. Because it feeds some creative's ego."
Then what about the whole awards for friends thing? How many pieces won this year for self promotion? From the top of my mind I can think of Humanoid (a production agency that does mostly if not exclusively ads), the helloworld website, the wiked pixel site, foxp2's office building and their boardroom table (and more stuff that I can't place right now). But seriously? A boardroom table? Have we become so jaded that we're giving our peers grand prix for their boardroom tables? I can't really blame the agencies that enter though, it's not like we have any real work to enter that clients actually bought and committed to. Well, that's unless national Geographic Kids Magazine really does have the county's biggest ad spend.
Let's face it, we're never going to get rid of awards. And why should we? What we should do is ban agencies from entering self promotion and get tougher on scam ads. I mean D&AD-if-you-enter-and-we-catch-you-you're-banned tough. Otherwise our clients are never going to take us seriously and we'll be forced to watch crappy poker ads for all eternity.
