For marketers, campaigns must be Effective and meet business goals. Period. For agencies, awards Provide encouragement and Motivation to be passionate and Deliver on those goals
Awards in the advertising and media world have gone from being a pat on the back to a valid currency denoting great work to an entire revenue-driven industry in itself. Consider the crème de la crème of such shows, the Cannes Lions that received a whopping 34,000 entries this year. Calculating the cost per entry that ranges from 299 to 1195, the awards can be tagged at an eight-digit figure going into astronomical figures in Indian currency.
The World Advertising Research Center or WARC’s 2012 list of advertising awards around the globe lists about 139 award functions this year. More than 50% of them invite entries globally and from APAC regions. If a top-notch global agency chooses to send in entries, it will have to allocate a specific budget and an entire team to handle award shows and prepare for entries. In India, the ABBYs, EMVIES and EFFIES - apart from a number of other smaller advertising award functions – take up the industry’s time and attention, with agencies putting in considerable effort to showcase their work.
So what do these awards mean to agencies that are spending lakhs of rupees to just enter award shows? And more significantly, how important are they to their demigods, the clients? Do the number of trophies displayed in your office determine the number of clients you have?
COMPARATIVE COST OF ENTRY IN AD AWARDS
Motivation and recognition
The collective voice of most industry experts, marketers and media agency heads we spoke to about the relevance and purpose of awards echoes ‘motivation and encouragement’. There is an industry belief that awards point to an agency consistently delivering on the parameter of excellence. Awards, besides being an egoboost, validate for both creative and media agencies the fact that they are there to do good work. “Awards signify recognition from your peer group and motivation to drive excellence, both from the agency and the client’s end,” says Punitha Arumugam, Director, Agency Business at Google India, who also co-chaired the EMVIES awards committee this year.
Awards must therefore act as milestones and signposts, steering the agency in the right direction. It is necessary not to consider them as the destination but the means to the destination, feels Ajay Kakar, Chief Marketing Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group. “Clients don’t want awards, clients want passion and awards help agencies build that passion,” he says.
As in the case of performing artistes, people in the agency fraternity too need to be on a high as they are creative by nature and need appreciation. Awards serve that purpose, feels LK Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer at LG Electronics India, adding that as a marketer, he is against creating ad campaigns just to win awards. Citing the Axe deodorant ad that won big awards at Cannes Lions and managed to be both creative and effective, he says, “Ads should serve the purpose and should not just be a work of art.”
That brings us to the ongoing debate of effective versus creative ads. The Oxford Dictionary Online defines the word ‘award’ as ‘a prize or other mark of recognition given in honour of an achievement’. So what does achievement mean in the domain - an extremely creative ad campaign, an extremely popular one or an effective one? “For a marketer, being creative just for the sake of creativity doesn’t help,” says Anisha Motwani, Director & Chief Marketing Officer, Max Life Insurance, adding that brilliant creatives should have proved themselves in the marketplace. Other marketers are of the opinion that between the ambit of creativity and effectiveness lies the biggest potential for awards. However, keeping motivation aside, do the awards benefit businesses?
Role of awards in a pitch
The majority of marketers we spoke to feel that while awards do boost their confidence in the agency, it is not an important factor while considering an agency during a pitch.
“Our focus is on advertising that works for our brands and awards are not the objective,” says Shivani Hegde, General Manager (Foods), Nestle India. Ashok Venkatramani, CEO of ABP News - who has had a 19- year stint with Hindustan Unilever Limited - too feels that awards are added features, but not fundamental to an agency’s profile. In his experience, “ads that win awards do not necessarily get sales and all ads that get sales are not award-winning stuff”.
Most agency credentials talk about the number of awards they have won. They act as stripes that people wear with pride or even flaunt as brownie points. “Awards matter, more with some clients than others... especially if the integrity quotient of the award is good. So if we have got something like a good consistent standing at the EMVIES, we feel very good about it. We definitely use it in our pitch,” says Vikram Sakhuja, Global CEO designate of Maxus.
Not an essential parameter
However, there seems to be no correlation between the number of awards won and pitching success, according to marketers. Hiring an agency through a pitching process involves many parameters and awards are probably the last consideration. “If somebody is giving business, it is going to be the cost of your business, what service you are going to give, whether you have dealt with something similar or not, etc. Decisions are never taken on one parameter alone,” feels Sunil Lulla, MD & CEO, Times News Network. Motwani adds to the parameter list: the track record of the agency in client servicing abilities, turnaround time, and most importantly its strategic depth. The overriding criterion, she emphasises, would be how the agency proposes to solve the marketer’s business challenge. In case there is a tie in the pitching process between two agencies and they stand equal on most points, then the marketer does tip on the one that has won some metals.
“Awards are normally given for campaigns that have been effective in growing the client or brand’s business, and in that sense, they do recognize great work. However, there are times when campaigns do get recognized just on the sheer strength of the relatively higher decibel levels. Hence awards should not be used as the only barometer to identify great agencies,” says Harpreet Singh Tibb, General Manager, Packaged Foods, Hindustan Unilever Ltd. At HUL, quality of work is more important and awards really don’t play a role in deciding agencies, he adds.
However, while awards don’t play a major role to influence the marketer at a pitch, they do give credibility to an agency, feels Praveen Tripathi, Chief Executive, Magic9 Media & Consumer Knowledge, as they bring to light some really good work that most times remains clogged up between the agency and the client. “Awards certainly give clients a different reference point of judging the agency compared to what the agency boasts while pitching. This is because hopefully, it is being judged by not one odd client of that agency but a wider forum of senior people. This enables greater credibility,” he says.
As far as media agency awards are concerned, Arumugam believes that it is marquee work that wins the media awards. Add to these awards the reputation with existing clients, and pitches could get biased. However, it seems that in media, awards go to especially those who have packaged it well. “In media awards, how the submissions have been packaged plays an important role. In creative awards the idea has to be strong, but in media awards so much goes into packaging,” validates Meenakshi Menon, Chairperson, Spatial Access Solutions.
‘No impact on business’
A contrarian is R Balki, Chairman and CCO of Lowe Lintas & Partners, who justifies keeping a deliberate distance from awards. “I don’t think anybody remembers what awards we got earlier and I don’t think awards have any impact on business. It is the ads you create that give people (clients) glory and not award shows. If the ad is not famous, then the award is not going to make the ad famous,” Balki says. “In India, awards have no impact, because here clients recognize that a lot of rubbish work keeps winning. Yes, there are some good pieces of work and clients know that the agency has done them very well. Even if they don’t get an award, they are recognized as good.”
There is also concern that awards don’t have much to do with the reality of the business. This happens when focus shifts from providing solutions to just creativity. “If you are looking at a pitch, you look at the solution that the agency is providing, which is customized to the brief that you give. So having won awards with another client in some other context doesn’t mean that I will get a great solution for my needs as a brand. What I would like to see is whether the agency has been working with other clients who have consistently shown good work because good work is the best testimony rather than just awards,” declares Gupta.
Time, manpower and fees
A young media planner, who does not want to be named, tells IMPACT that it is not unheard of in media and creative agencies to create model campaigns just for the sake of awards. “Just like films that are made for film festivals,” she quips.
Advertising and marketing expert John Follis of Follis/NY says in an article on his website that participating in an awards event itself involves so much effort that it is like ‘servicing a small account for a month’. The question is, is it worth specifically allocating manpower to handle awards?
Most agency heads agree that it is very timeconsuming and requires serious research and data. Tripathi highlights the point of concern. “Entries have to be brought to a common platform. That is important for the judges to be able to assess them properly. If the PPT files that are being sent to an agency’s client are simply sent to the awards authorities, they won’t be enough. Thus, some amount of work needs to go in to prepare for entries,” he says.
Many a time, preparing for entries means spending time on a unique one-off work which can be creatively brilliant but not something that works in the marketplace consistently. This could be a buzz-kill especially when the work is for a smaller client and has not even gone on air in the traditional media space.
To gauge the tediousness of preparing for entries, here is a look at how long the entry forms of various awards are:
Global: Cannes Lions has an entire website, worded at over 10,000 characters. Regional: Spikes Asia has a website too; all the 17 categories have entire pages of procedures and rules & regulations dedicated to them that are further divided into 16 parts. That means having to go through 272 sections of verbose text. National: EMVIES has a 3210-word entry form; Creative ABBYs a 4069-word entry form Fees and entry charges for most of these awards are steep. (See table – comparative cost analysis)
How awards help
“Industry awards are an excellent platform to review and recognize breakthrough work being done by agencies. It is a look at clutterbreaking work in one glance,” says Tibb.
Such work often institutes recognition which marketers feel is synonymous to out-of-the box thinking and seamless collaboration with the other constituents of the media industry. “As a client, this fact (recognition) would help inspire confidence in me that my agency will be walking the extra mile to deliver a greater ROI on my spends, and as a broadcaster it tells me that the agency will be a great collaborator who will help us to push some of our own boundaries,” says Avinash Kaul, Chief Executive Officer of ET NOW, TIMES NOW and Zoom.
Media agency heads believe that if you have got a spread of awards across all the categories especially in unconventional spaces, it makes a statement that you are a true full service media agency. Clients get very excited when you showcase stuff that you have done in a niche category. It could be sports, activation, film association, creating content for the Internet, etc.
Sakhuja says winning awards do sometimes help agencies bag accounts. “We have won business on the basis of awards. We do a lot of good work with such clients,” he says.
Another positive point of advertising and media awards, according to Menon, is that they help industry recruiters spot talent.
In conclusion, awards can be termed feathers in the cap for an agency, but not the cap itself.
Feedback: diaha.thakker @exchange4media.com
