It’s a Major Award!
Advertising is an art form. But who judges the work of creative advertising professionals, and who benefits from entering advertising competitions?
It’s a Major Award!
Advertising is an art form. But who judges the work of creative advertising professionals, and who benefits from entering advertising competitions?
When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, I often videotaped live television shows I suspected I might want to hold on to. Long before the internet or even Tivo, the only way to rewatch something from TV was to remember to tape it live. As long as you labeled your recordings, you could relive your favorites “on-demand” as many times as you wanted, or at least until you or a family member accidentally taped over it with something else.
My mountains of VHS tapes held everything from You Can’t Do That On Television to The Real Ghostbusters, HBO comedy specials to Michael Jackson music videos, every Mathnet short from Square One Television strung together as mini-movies, and even “special” specials like Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. But possibly my all-time favorite taped-off-TV event, and something I remember every part of even today, was The 1987 Clio Awards.
You may think that’s a weird thing for a ten-year-old boy to be into, especially one who had absolutely no idea they would get into marketing and advertising later in life. Indeed, I remember the only reason I recorded this particular special was that it was hosted by L.A. Law stars and real-life couple Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry, and I was obsessed with L.A. Law. (I was an odd kid.)
I haven’t seen the special in over thirty years (believe me, I’ve looked for it) but I can still recite many of the best ads from memory, including the “Dear John” song from a BASF spot. I marveled at how some of the ads seemed to have the budget of a major motion picture, while others could have been done with no money at all, like one ad which was just white text on a black background for the entire thirty seconds. Most of all, I distinctly remember how I felt seeing the best commercials respected as an art form rather than an annoyance.
I’m sure many people, even today in the age of Super Bowl ad parties, don’t think much about the time and effort that goes into the creation of advertising. From the pre-roll YouTube ad you can’t skip through, to the funny billboard on the off-ramp, to the pizza coupon in your mailbox, to the sponsored ad in your Facebook feed, we are now bombarded by advertising at every moment of our lives. In fact, it’s widely estimated that the average American is exposed to 4,000-10,000 ads per day. Of course, it doesn’t feel like that many, because so few stand out. That’s exactly why there’s a market for rewarding the best artists in the field. Today there are dozens (if not hundreds!) of reputable competitions that an advertising professional can pay enter their work into.
The decision to enter one’s creative product into an awards competition isn’t easy. For starters, every award you enter carries a significant entry fee and a statistical unlikelihood of success. The aforementioned Clio Awards, for example, charge $525-$1,150 per entry, and less than 5% of entries win any award at all. In addition to the raw cost, it takes a lot of staff time to prepare each entry for submission, including rigorous paperwork and, sometimes, preparing and shipping multiple copies of physical items to the judges. That’s a lot of cost and effort for a slim chance that someone will tell you that your work is good. Especially when you already know it’s good.
Yet there’s something special about entering a piece you’re proud of, particularly on behalf of a client project you worked hard on. Clients love being told you’ve won an award for them, as design is a collaborative process and they’ve earned some of the credit, too. It also allows the client to create press releases and social media posts bragging about the recognition, often with shout-outs to the designers as well, which benefits everyone.
Internally, it’s great for team morale when advertising industry experts, who generally comprise the judges at such events, acknowledge that our designers can compete with the best in our field. This is good for “benchmarking” as well, making sure our designs remain cutting-edge by modern standards.
I’ll never forget my first professional creative award. It was a Pollie Award, the so-called “Oscars of Political Advertising,” given out by the American Association of Political Consultants. My entry was a :60 second TV spot in support of Barack Obama that I had done entirely by myself, with my own voiceover and simple animation, during the competitive 2008 election. I had created it more or less on a whim, and didn’t expect many people to see it, but it took off online when respected political commentators began sharing it on their blogs. A small non-profit called Truth and Hope asked if they could pay to run the ad nationally, with no changes, and I agreed. To my absolute shock, this ad beat out the nation’s biggest advertising firms to take the national First Place Pollie Award for Best Presidential Ad of 2008. (Obama’s own campaign team came in second.) At the awards ceremony in D.C., people from large agencies couldn’t believe they had been beaten by a sole proprietor. I couldn’t believe it, either. But it gave me the confidence to continue in my profession. And I’m still reminded how sometimes even a zero-budget ad, properly executed, can reach people if it’s done right. A lesson I likely learned from a certain 1987 television special played over and over on VHS and in my head.
Here at Addis Enterprises, we have yet to enter our work into the Clio Awards (see cost, above), but I’d like to someday, if only to fulfill a personal dream that wasn’t even fully formed when I was ten. But we do enter a few of our favorite pieces each awards season, generally into two competitions: The American Advertising Awards, run by the American Advertising Federation (AAF), the oldest national advertising trade association in the United States; and the MARCOM Awards, run by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP). These competitions have strong reputations, diverse categories, and more reasonable entry fees ($85-$125 per piece). Despite our limited number of entries, our team is proud to have won over 50 awards across these two competitions, and I personally have been honored with awards across categories as diverse as web design, logo design and branding, original music composition, and video production. We never take winning for granted, and are thrilled and humbled every time our work is honored in any way.
35 years ago (!), I fell in love with my first creative advertising competition. I’ve now been on both sides of the judge’s table, having judged several awards competitions, and now serving as President of the mid-Michigan chapter of the American Advertising Federation, AAF Lansing. The best part of these experiences is being exposed to a wide variety of high-end design and marketing work being done by advertisers across the country. I share impressive pieces with my creative team, and they find work that inspires them as well. Together, this makes us all better designers, developers, and visual artists, which in turn translates into more successful marketing pieces for our clients.
Because if it really is true that we’re exposed to 4,000-10,000 advertisements per day, the ads we make for you better be the ones to remember.
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