The Reward Award

Agencies love awards. Consultants prefer rewards. Where do we sit?

Originally published for Yakkazoo in 2024

Every advertising agency website displays them. Most creatives list them on their LinkedIn profiles. People travel around the world to receive them. Some are gold, some silver and some are glass. They are all shiny and they have quirky names: Clio, Lion, Webby, Shorty, Addy. They are advertising awards and we have bugger all of them.

When Michael announced recently he wants to have us entered in advertising awards there was an audible groan from some of the team – myself included. We have never been ‘that’ agency – one where a constant focus is one entering and winning awards. But should we?

Advertising is a creative field, and like movie making, there is a desire for peer recognition for excellence. We understand, and we have a few award winners on our team. Even I picked up a New York Festivals gong a few years back for a campaign I wrote. But at Yakkazoo we have tended to stay clear of them, for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, they take time and money. A lot of time! Some agencies have FTEs dedicated just to that task. It takes the team’s focus away from the clients. Also the cost can be crazy high just to enter. On the flip side you get a great slap up feed and a few Bollys if you become a finalist. Secondly, the big question is what do they really mean for clients? Do business owners and their CMOs translate awards into bottomline success? Most focus solely on creativity though many have now included awards for outstanding results. But do they matter?  

For our agency Michael was right, there is a strong argument to engage in them, as they can certainly raise your profile and eyeballs are important to us. So there’s that. And don’t get me wrong, if a Cannes Lion turned up in the post we would be parading it down Flinders Street with a marching band up front being rained on by streamers and confetti. 

But we also would never lose focus on our greatest award – the rewards of our client’s success. As we have been assembling the content for a new website case studies have been written and results sourced for campaigns we have created and experiences we have run. It is also the nature of agencies that the best results are never always handed over by our clients without prompting, so we often have to push them for the final campaign results and feedback. As they have come in though I have been beaming with pride at some of the results we have helped our clients achieve. 

Some are quite subtle and require a decent knowledge of the industry to understand their significance. Our recent VivAId event achieved 80% attendance. Twenty percent drop off doesn’t sound too great but when similar events usually run at 40-50% drop-off from registration, you know you have done something right. 

Or the Hotondo Homes TVC we created that picked up 350,000 views on their own Youtube channel – outside of the significant eyeballs our broadcast media plan achieved. Or the New Balance Industrial content we wrote and produced that through compelling storytelling achieved a 50% thru play on Instagram and 22% thru play on a skippable 30 second video.

These are real rewards. They show audiences focused on a brand, recognition rising, click-throughs running hot, sales spiking, engagement building, business growing. These are the types of results that we really love because they are about our impact on a business. The type of results high street consultants love, the kind business owners desire, the type of rewards we strive for.

We will certainly enter more awards. The publicity would be helpful, but we will never lose sight of our mission to go beyond what the industry we are in expects to focus solely on finding the path to business success for our clients. That is our destination and finding it is the real reward.  

Grant Whitehouse Head of Strategy