Helen Pak has judged nearly a dozen awards shows in the past 18 months including the Clios, One Show and New York Festivals. While each show boasts its own unique selling proposition, she noted they share a common trait: what goes on behind-the-scenes and in the judging rooms is always shrouded in mystery.
The notion of transparency has loomed large in advertising in recent years, informing everything from how clients’ money is spent to how marketers use the abundance of consumer data at their disposal. So in all those jury rooms, Pak found it a little bit strange that agency networks were willing to spend literally millions on such an opaque process. (One recent insider report pegged the total value of the global ad award show economy at US$45 million.)
“What if we could lift the curtain and give a glimpse into everything that goes into that?’” says Pak, Havas Worldwide Canada CEO and chief creative officer. “Not just the comments and who won Best of Show and why—which I think is the price of entry for all awards shows—but everything: the deliberations, what are the conversations, what did jurors eat for lunch and who showed up late?”
As co-chair of the 2016 Marketing Awards alongside BBDO Canada president and CEO Dom Caruso, Pak got her shot. When asked by Marketing if Havas would create a promotional campaign for the awards, she pitched one that would “lift the curtain” on the country’s biggest advertising show. What resulted was “More Awards. Less Mystery,” an idea that put cameras in the jury room, produced transcripts of deliberations and forced Marketing staff to debate some tough questions. (In a bit of Ourobouros-like logic, the idea would even go on to spawn this very article.)
While there is a direct correlation between creative awards and clients’ business success (a 2010 study by the U.K.’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found creatively awarded campaigns are up to 11 times more effective than those that don’t win awards), there is also growing concern among agency heads about everything from the deepening cost of entries to how their work is judged.
“Awards shows feel like a real mystery to agencies a lot of the time,” says Marketing’s events editor Kate Wilkinson, who manages the magazine’s slate of awards. They spend “a whack of money” on entries (from several hundred dollars, up to as much as $15,000 for the larger shops) that enter a black-box process and, with luck come out winners.
While it’s unclear if it’s due to this growing unease or award show over-saturation in the market, the Marketing Awards has seen some declines in entries and attendance in recent years. Its promotional campaigns (typically done pro bono) must not only spur submissions, but sell tickets to the gala.
Marketing’s editor-in-chief Shane Schick served as the ultimate “client” decision-maker on the campaign, and liked Havas’ idea to “go to extremes” in documenting what went on behind-the-scenes, utilizing an approach made famous by the Harper’s Index. He even greenlit putting a videographer in the jury room to capture deliberations and jurors talking, for example, about the types of creative concepts they feel are played out (it was special vending machines, talking animals and the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects, by the way).
“The biggest question for a lot of people is not ‘Who won?’ but ‘Why did the other people not win?’” says Schick. “We wanted to look at the process, because it’s often very unclear to people.”
The “less mystery” concept was first made clear in a series of ads overseen by Cory Eisentraut, Havas vice-president and creative director. The winking campaign laid bare many of the untold truths of advertising awards shows, including the multiple planned deadline extensions (two, in total, to accommodate the many expected latecomers) and the overwhelming odds against winning gold (97% of Marketing Awards entrants won’t win the top prize).
Other ads acknowledged the fact that most people don’t buy tickets to industry events until the last minute, something Wilkinson has learned to take in stride. When only 70% of the June 2 gala tickets had been sold one week prior to the event, Wilkinson was unphased. “I’ve panicked so often about Marketing conferences and award shows that I don’t have it in me anymore to panic,” she says. That’s why the first ticket ads didn’t even connect to the ticketing site. Curious visitors to MarketingMag.ca clicked-through to a video of a puppy.
But, the strength of the co-chairs commitment to transparency would face an unexpected challenge when this year’s jury decided not to award Best of Show, marking the first time in recent history that the biggest prize went unclaimed. The Marketing Awards have seen their fair share of controversy over the years: the Taxi boycott of 2001 over the infamous “Merit” ad; and “Pain Squad” winning in 2012 despite technically not being eligible because it was non-profit work. But, the decision to not bestow the show’s most prestigious award is sure to be among the biggest.
“We all sat in a room, very talkative as you can imagine, with vocal creative directors from all over the country and when it came to Best of Show, suddenly there was complete silence,” says Pak, recalling the jury deliberations. The jury had seen and awarded outstanding work in many categories, but “we weren’t able to come to a consensus” on whether one gold winner was head-and-shoulders above the others. “The natural tendency in some shows is to say ‘We have to pick a Best of Show,’ [but] we decided as a group we couldn’t do that. We were not prepared to put something forward just to put something forward.”
Unlike many other award shows, however, this year’s 1,478 entrants weren’t kept totally in the dark about what really went down in the jury room. The campaign shot a video with jurors explaining their choice. A note-taker also documented the entire two-and-a-half days of deliberations, with some of her notes making it into the script for the awards gala at The Carlu.
But, here again was another challenge to the concept of transparency. Pak had wanted to make the entire transcript available to the industry but, after some vigorous debate about the merits of such a tactic, was ultimately overruled by Schick. He says many jurors have strong professional and personal relationships with their industry peers, all of which could be undermined by releasing a full transcript of their remarks. “Creating an environment where they felt safe was super-important to me,” says Schick.
In the co-chairs’ letter published in the awards annual, Pak and Caruso outline the discussion and the thinking that informed the jury’s decision not to select a Best of Show winner (“I don’t think it’s going to be good,” says Pak when asked what she expected industry reaction to be). Her hope, however, is that this type of transparency becomes standard for future Marketing Awards and other awards shows. “The reason we’re doing this is to better inform the industry, and give as much insight into why good work is chosen, and hopefully learn from that,” says Pak.
Editor’s Note (in the spirit of the campaign’s “no detail left unturned” tactic): editor-in-chief Shane Schick, being a source and subject of this article, did not read or edit it before it was published.
