Last week Campaign ran a piece about the decline in scam advertising entered into Cannes this year. In the inset it included a fairly sensible defence of scam work from Neil French which is simply to say "if it's interesting, who cares?" Just as no-one really cares whether catwalk fashion is wearable or not.
This to me is still Exhibit A in the case for the Defence. We enjoy looking at great work, and it helps inspire us. There is of course the risk that through scam work (as I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog) great ideas are squandered on miniscule businesses - so that a chip shop ends up running a campaign that could have made millions for KFC. But that is not the fault of awards, it is the fault of an exaggerated obsession with originality that pervades our industry. If we were run like a sane business, Cannes would become a giant trade fair.... and some Japanese 4x4 manufacturer would pay the Land Rover Owners Club of Malaysia and their creative team £500,000 for their campaign idea. Alas this is not how things work, and a great number of creative people lack swimming pools as a result.
Exhibit B is simply that awards are an aid to hiring. That is not to say that you should hire the team with the most awards, but simply that you should think before hiring any team which has been working for a few years and yet has never won any awards at all. The fact that you can do the award-winning stuff when the occasion requires is important, since it proves you have that mix of talent, ambition and tenacity which you'll need as a team if you are to be any use in the long run. Awards are a bit like A-Level Latin: even if it's not much use in itself, it is evidence of a tolerable degree of intelligence, ability and commitment.
But there is a dangerous downside to awards, and it is exacerbated by league tables, Gunn Reports and bonus schemes which reward people proportionately according to the number of awards they win. All these things create the belief that someone who wins 15 awards is three times better than someone who wins five. This is a little like hiring as graduate trainees whichever applicants have the most A-Levels. (I don't know about you, but to me a cv with 17 A -Levels on it would suggest not a great hire but some kind of wacko). To attach numerical rather than subjective values to awards is to fall foul of Goodhart's Law, which states that any metric which becomes a target loses its meaning as a metric.
But the worst effect of awards is really that they may encourage creatives to compete.
Eh? How can I, a bit of a Thatcherite and all that, suddenly attack competition.
Well, only if I explain - as this blog post does very neatly - that there are two kinds of competition. When you compete for something, and when you compete against someone. The first is much more creative than the second.
When you compete against people, you use the same frame of reference they are using. The competition generally becomes formalised, and conventions are observed. Most sports are eventually codified this way.And, like most sports, it largely deteriorates into a zero-sum game. Fundamentally the activity is self-referential rather than being truly original.It also leads to the kind of sameness and commoditisation which should be anathema to any good marketer - a bunch of me-too products which all compete on the same measures and which are largely defined by their competitors.
The alternative is to ignore a peer group and compete for something external.
Or, as Buckminster Fuller had it, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In other words, don't use your competitors' metrics, devise one of your own. Dyson, iPod, easyJet...... it's an easy list to write.
Now if you want to see an example of where competition goes wrong, where it deteriorates from the healthy form to the ingrown version, once again Neil French's fashion industry holds a lesson.
Take a look at women's fashion - possibly the greatest example of misdirected human effort since the Germans lost 3m men invading a country I don't even want to go to on holiday. A pointless industry which pollutes the high street of every town in the country, leaving little room for essentials such as curry houses, ironmongers and pubs.
At some point, maybe a million years ago, women used their clothes to attract men. However, outside the more vulgar form of film, this technique has now become lost. Women now buy clothes simply to intimidate other women. For women have entirely lost sight of their primary target audience and concentrate exclusively on the secondary audience - each other.
The apotheosis of this movement arises in the UGG Boot, an item of footwear so fantastically repellent to men it is impossible for us to become even partially aroused when within 100 yards of any pair (even if they are in a locked wardrobe).
Have awards gone the same way? In other words are they now merely, like women's fashion, a battleground for peer-group intimidation rather than having any surviving intrinsic purpose. An arms race, in economic parlance.
The solution is fairly simple. Restrict entry to one international awards show and one local one. Bank the money you save. Use it to create fabulously generous rewards for creatives who win these awards for existing clients. And also fabulously lavish rewards for non-award-winning work which is remarkable in some non-formulaic way - or for work which is startlingly effective. Make sure that the work rewarded is always remarkable but often unexpected. Reward the huge and good alongside the small and great.
