T.J. Prebil

Advertising Agency Awards

This post was originally published on www.InspiredConceptsInc.com.

I follow several interactive advertising agencies on Twitter and over the past month or so I’ve noticed quite a few tweets regarding industry awards. For instance, one agency just won a best-in-class design award, another was touting a creative accolade, and a third agency – a candidate for digital agency of the decade – was pandering to voters.

Awards are powerful distinctions that companies can use to win business, maintain relationships, and gain positioning on competitors. A company listed as great place to work or recognized for its superior customer service, for example, can leverage such acknowledgments to support its core business functions (e.g. attracting employees and maintaining customer relationships).

When it comes to advertising agency awards, however, there seems to be a disconnect between the agency’s objectives and a client’s goals. For instance, industry awards tend to emphasize “creativity” while barely touching upon the overall effectiveness of the project. In other words, advertising industry awards rarely focus on how an agency actually helped a client achieve its goals.

David Meerman Scott touched upon this in his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR when he noted that in the past “it was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win customers.” Based on the tweets I’ve received recently, it appears that many in the advertising industry have not read his book.

In an effort to help advertising and digital agencies adjust to the new rules of marketing, I recommend that the industry adopt the following award categories:

• The “exceeded client’s objectives” award
• The “achieved the most sales” award
• The “generated the most leads” award

Ideally, these new awards would become the advertising industry’s Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress awards, while relegating creative and design awards to Best Adapted Screenplay or Best Costume Design. It’s likely that my suggestions will fall on deaf ears but these new categories would not only prioritize objectives but also provide agencies with awards that can actually be used to support their core business functions (e.g. winning business on merit).