Category Archives: awarding

awarding

The Engines of Objectivity: Media Awards Shows … and the necessity of the Faustian pact by which we are judged

another week another round of award entering and ceremony attending. or at least so it seems. this week’s PHDcast is a debrief from last week’s MFA Awards … we discuss the events of the night, the winners, the fall out, and the very point of awards themselves. what exactly, are awards good for anyway?

the growth in local and international awards reflects the fragmentation of media itself. here in Australia we have the Mumbrella Awards, B&Ts, Adnews, and of course the MFAs from last week. regionally you get the Spikes, Campaign Asia, but also Festival of Media … and globally Cannes, the Internationalist, (more) Spikes and Festival of Media … I could go on (there’s a rich seam of digital awards to mine I haven’t touched on), but the point is I think made, that award entering could pretty much be a full-time job.

the growth extends to more categories within an individual award platform; each year see’s more and more categories at Cannes, and the MFAs this year had an additional two categories in which contenders could do their thing.

all this means more resource in agencies to fuel the fire of award entering and competing – a point very elegantly made by Zenith’s Ian Perrin in a guest post on Mumbrella back in August. in the rather provocatively entitled ‘Let’s end the awards obsession and stop putting our dollars in the hands of publishers’, Perrin referred to a conversation with a CMO, who commented:

“I am so sick to death of being asked to submit our work into bloody award festivals that nobody has ever heard of, or cares about. If I went into a board presentation and declared that we had won a bronze in a Tasmanian advertising awards festival, I would be fired on the spot. And yet all my agencies seem to care about is entering these awards” he said. “Who cares if the Tasmanian’s loved my print ad, when I still have stock on the shelf at Coles?”

unnamed prominent and influential CMO

the comment thread (bitching a trolling aside), pretty much gets to the nub of the issue: award shows are big business … EMAP, which bought the Cannes Advertising Festival (now the Cannes Festival of Creativity) in 2004 and manages it under it’s i2i brand, last year returned to profit in no small part due to the healthy return it generates from the event and others like it.

“The star performer has been events division i2i grew revenues about 10% year on year in the first half to £71m, thanks to its Spring Fair retail event at the NEC centre and advertising event Cannes Lions in France, with underlying earnings up 16% to £33m. The division accounts for half of Top Right’s revenues and 70% of underlying profits.”

source, the Guardian, July 2012

70% of underlying profits coming from events. that’s probably something that isn’t too far from the reality of a lot of former publishers (I say former as many have now well and truly diversified their businesses and incomes to combat the decline of print ad revenues – no more elegantly than Mumbrella). awards are a pretty good way for publishers to make money, so what’s ultimately in it for agencies?

well rather a lot …

a showcase for the work, the work, the work (as one agency puts it). and not just the work you would like to be rewarded and acknowledged but rather the work that has been peer reviewed by your industry colleagues, which leads to:

acknowledgement of the results you are delivering for your clients … awards are tangible demonstrations of how an agency is helping clients grow their brands and generate return for their investment in your strategies and ideas, which leads to:

a reputation for thinking and work that is, crucially, acknowledged by your peers. you don’t just say you rock – you have a subjective benchmark to say just how much you do, actually, rock. which in theory leads to:

getting onto more pitch lists, clients respect your thinking and want to explore how you can deliver for their brand and business. so awards are ultimately (of course) about growing your business.

we’re not, I think, alone. across other industries in which the success or outcome of the product is inherently subjective (design, architecture, literature) awards are prevalent. awards are like objective engines … transforming the subjectivity of opinion into tangibility of proof. of course they’re still essentially subjective (the Effies perhaps aside), but not all subjectivity is, I suppose, created equal.

and so we’re left with a rather Faustian pact; publishers build the engines of objectivity that agencies need … and we feed them. relentlessly.

which is no bad thing … especially in an awards platform like the MFAs, throughout which (as entrant, judge, and attendee) I’ve seen nothing but professionalism and careful consideration and judgement. indeed they have created and been the forum for important debates – like the one Nic and Stew describe from their judging room (in the PHDcast above). and you also get to have a bit of fun on awards night.

so a big congrats again to all the winners, especially team PHD for their ANZ nomination and PepsiCo win, Steady for his induction into the MFA Hall of Fame and Initiative for their Grand Prix win. you can view all the winners here. see you next year for more of the same.

MFA Awards 2013 1

MFA Awards 2013 2

MFA Awards 2013 3

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awarding, conferencing, debating, printing, publishing

Celebrating the end of the Party: Why dumping the junket is exactly what The Caxtons needs

hamilton-island

so I’ve just returned from The Guardian Australia’s launch drinks, but before I call it a night I thought tonight’s happy event made it timely to throw some thoughts down about yesterdays shock report in Adnews that “The Caxtons’ famed jamboree to an exotic location will not happen this year. But the awards will. And next year the junket could be back.” … furthermore “Tasmania has been mooted.”

well phew. heaven forbid that in the midst of the biggest systemic shift in print advertising in several generations we miss the chance to junket it up somewhere exotic.

I should declare an interest; I was honoured and privileged to be asked to speak at last year’s Caxtons – on Hamilton Island, above – so last year I very much enjoyed the benefit of giving a presentation in Adnews’ mourned-for sunny climes.

I have to be honest though; I didn’t wholly enjoy my presentation. and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why.

the truth is that I wasn’t at my best … it wasn’t the most focused of talks, and that’s my bad. but I think it was also a lot to do with the room; a mix of mainly newspaper staffers, ad agency people, journalists and some flotsam and jetsam like me. you see sometimes when you present the room is with you, and if you’re like me that makes you better. but sometimes the room isn’t with you, and that makes some people stronger, but if you’re like me it makes nagging doubt creep in … perhaps I’m wrong? perhaps I’m a crazy person for even suggesting this!? and when your presentation to a bunch of creatives pivots around your (my) belief that “the worst thing that ever happened to advertising is adverts” you can see how that would affect your (my) performance.

I’ve gotten pretty good at reading rooms, and I think the reality is that whilst I wasn’t, by my full admission, at my best … a lot of people in the room just didn’t want to absorb the message: that the time had come to change.

my audience, perhaps quite rightly, wanted to get on with what the Caxtons are there to do: celebrate creativity in newspaper advertising. who the freak was I to turn up and rain on such a brilliantly orchestrated parade? people’s hearts and souls and time and effort had gone in to organising that celebration. people much better than me had created ingenious and awesome presentations to delight and entertain and stimulate.

the words of Maya Angelou echoed in my head that night and many nights since: “People will forget what you said, People will forget what you did, But people will never forget how you made them feel” (source) … and I think that is why I failed that day on Hamilton Island – when the words and actions were long gone, I had made that room feel no better about the situation I believe press advertising is in. I hadn’t followed-though my dark night to deliver a dawn. I’d attempted, but it hadn’t landed.

so why the confession? well, yesterday’s Adnews report that – essentially – the party was over, filled me with nothing but sheer optimism. because the party is over, and that’s what I so desperately tried but failed to say last year. but the party being over makes it all the more important that the celebration continues. because what I experienced on that island, that energy and passion and creativity shouldn’t be lost because of some crazy perception that the Caxtons is a junket … what I witnessed was much more than that. the Caxtons isn’t living the vida loca in some exotic location, its an idea … an idea shared by some staggeringly creative and passionate people.

the Caxtons, like print advertising, must reinvent itself … and that is a conference (in the truest sense of the word) that has never been more urgent nor necessary. this is the Caxtons’ opportunity to fight for its own future, I believe that it’s more than up to the task.

featured and above image via trip advisor

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awarding, celebrating, cinema, community-building, imagining, innovating

A Counterpoint for Cannes: Lessons from the Sundance Film Festival

Sundance-film-festival

so I was listening, as is my want, to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s Movie Review Podcast (which is very good btw) as they were live from The Sundance Film Festival which was visiting London. they were interviewing John Cooper, Director of the SFF who described how the festival first came about:

“Sundance … was created to find a safe haven for artists to become better and to make better cinema … then we started this thing … we called labs, which were basically workshops where filmmakers come and work on their scripts with mentors and there’s a whole mentoring process … very quickly after that [we] were making movies but they weren’t getting seen anywhere so we needed to create a platform and that was the Sundance Film Festival and that’s how it started” (source)

the festival has seen the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne and Tarantino all hone and develop their skills in an environment where risk-taking is encouraged and protected; a very different environment to Cannes or the Oscars … where the focus is on subjective judgement by peers and winning awards.

I couldn’t help but think and wish that there was a Sundance equivelant for our industry. the Cannes Festival of Creativity (which will soon see the great and good head off to the south of France for the annual networkathon) is basically our Oscars, and it has its place.

but there doesn’t seem to be a counterpoint? we don’t have a Sundance.

certainly in Australia the Media Federation Awards, like the B&T awards and Adnews awards, all follow the Cannes / Oscars template … glitz and glamour as the campaigns and ideas judged to be the best allow the people who submitted them to have a fully deserved 15 seconds in the glare of the lights.

how awesome would it be if the above quote read:

“Incubator … was created to find a safe haven for planners to become better and to generate better innovations … then we started this thing … we called labs, which were basically workshops where planners come and work on their ideas with mentors and there’s a whole mentoring process … very quickly after that [we] were creating innovation but they weren’t getting seen anywhere so we needed to create a platform and that was the Incubator Ideas festival and that’s how it started”

how awesome? very.

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