Winning industry awards can mean as much to a business as nailing a pitch or delivering spectacular ROI. But awards are the result of great award show submissions, a format many agencies have yet to master.
During last week’s Understanding Media Innovation event in Toronto, judges that recently sat on juries for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and Marketing’s Media Innovation Awards dished on both the noteworthy and not-worthy submissions they’ve encountered. The Marketing event drew a crowd of media and creative agency professionals interested in hearing behind-the-scenes stories from the judging trenches.
When asked what he tells his marketer clients about the importance of entering industry awards, Mainardo de Nardis, CEO of OMD Worldwide and the 2012 Cannes Media Lions jury president, said it’s “to focus on awards more than in the past” because it’s necessary to celebrate ideas across markets.
“It’s not just to have a few nice Lions to adorn our reception,” de Nardis added, but about celebrating agencies’ success.
Sunni Boot, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Canada and a judge of this year’s Cannes Media Lions, didn’t mince words when describing the importance of earning this type of industry recognition. Awards “earn serious talk value,” she said, not to mention press coverage.
Here’s a quick list of expert opinions on how to make your agency’s entries stand out:
• Boot notices that more creative and promotion agencies have been entering media award shows. “Media is everywhere and everything is media… We should expand where we enter,” she said.
• Commenting on the 3,329 entries the Media Lions jury evaluated this year at Cannes, Boot commented on how critical it is to make an impact right off the bat with the submission. “You’ve got to capture the judges in the first little while. It became almost military [going through the submissions],” she said. At one point in his presentation, de Nardis made reference to a 14-hour day of judging. “I thought it was 17,” said Boot from the audience. De Nardis then joked that he must have fallen asleep for three hours.
• Cathy Collier, CEO of OMD Canada, was a co-chair for the 2012 MIAs jury and said that, given the hundreds of entries the jury had to evaluate, “video is everything. It has to catch you.” She said there’s room to improve in the production and voice-over departments with the entries from media agencies.
• MIA co-chair Angela Scardillo, vice-president of marketing at Best Buy Canada, said the volume of entries means each video often gets only five minutes of a judge’s time and it can disrupt the flow of the process if an entry requires the judge to leave the judging portal to go to YouTube to find a campaign video because it wasn’t included in the entry.
• Scardillo also suggests using point-form notes in submissions with key takeaways that defend your submission.
• Anne Myers, group president at Mediavest, said when it comes to including social media metrics like tweet volume and Facebook fan acquisition, make sure to give context of how those number represent growth. Otherwise, they don’t paint a picture of the campaign’s impact.
• Rebecca Shropshire, VP, director of digital communications at UM, recommended reading the descriptions of each award category carefully so that you enter properly. “A lot of great work was submitted to the wrong category,” she said. Andrew Barrett, VP marketing at Samsung, agreed. “Sweat over the category,” he said. The MIAs jury saw campaigns entered for an integrated award, but not in the actual category in which they compete (i.e. financial, auto, CPG). Only entering in integrated narrows your chances, he said.
• Jake Norman, president and chief strategy officer at Mindshare Canada, advised against using the clichéd line about rolling out a campaign with nearly no budget. “If every award had no budget, we wouldn’t be sitting here with jobs,” he said.
• Barrett said make your video “good, logical and entertaining” and write the story to your audience of judges. He recalled that when his son overheard him watching video entries he said, “Dad, they’ve got every song on your playlist.”
