Around the end of November 2015, I was on my way to London for the first (of many) industry awards nights. I’d made the most of the progression opportunities that I talked about in Chapter 2 and a couple of us had been put forward for a Rising Star award.
A day out of the office, three-course meal and free drinks, entertainment from a random Britain’s Got Talent act, and the chance to mix with some of the best agencies in the industry.
It was good fun. Until the punch in the gut when your name isn’t called out as the winner.
Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to even be nominated and didn’t expect to win. But nobody really remembers who was shortlisted and it’s an expensive night for the company if you don’t come back with a trophy.
This happened again a few months later and by the third time I was shortlisted, I mostly felt guilty and asked to not be put forward again after this as it was getting a little embarrassing.
I’d practised my gracious loser’s face, but luck was on my side that night and my career undoubtedly changed.
See, you’ll struggle to find many bigger advocates for industry awards than me. I wouldn’t be where I am today without mine and neither would my current agency.
But this post isn’t to convince you that awards are great. I have no reason to.
There are important lessons and valid opinions for and against them. Hopefully you’ll appreciate a different take on agency awards and see what it really takes to enter and win.
Pay-to-play
The cost of every award entry that I’ve ever been involved in has come out of a marketing budget. It’s a marketing tactic.
Sure, it’s great recognition for the team and you’ll hear plenty of people say that, but this comes second and there are lots of other ways to reward people’s efforts that aren’t as time consuming or expensive.
This might sound obvious to some, but one of the big issues around agency awards is the barrier to entry and I feel like this frustration is misguided.
Awards always have been and always will be pay-to-play, but so is marketing.
If you crunch some rough numbers; a single entry might be £200 on average, entering 5 categories would be £1,000, and then 4 or 5 different awards throughout the year could be a total of £5k. You’ve then got the cost of tickets, travel, hotels, and the bar bill if you want to get the most out of the night, so it’s more likely to be a five figure investment.
The question is really about whether your agency wants to justify that spend over something else. It’s understandable if not, how many of us could comfortably ask a client to spend thousands of pounds with no guaranteed return?
I’ve spent the money and won nothing on lots of occasions. I’ve taken the risks as a small agency with limited budgets and it’s paid off. And I’ve stopped entering awards when there have been other marketing priorities or the costs couldn’t be justified.
However an agency chooses to spend their marketing budget shouldn’t be a reason to discredit awards, the reasons for entering, or the businesses and judges behind them though.
Claims that you have to buy a table to win or the judging is fixed are a distraction. My current agency has won 20+ awards over the last seven years, including times when we didn’t even turn up to the event, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you a single judge’s name that picked us as the winner.
Of course, it’s expensive. But it’s risk versus reward, and the opportunity is there for any agency investing in their marketing.
Who cares?
The biggest question when it comes to awards is who cares if you win or what you win?
I believe lots of people care about awards to some extent, but not necessarily as much as you might think or want them to. This is my experience in terms of who cares the most to the least:
1) Owners/directors
Nobody will care about award wins more than the owners or directors of the agency. It’s a stamp of approval on your business, sets you apart from competitors, and it’s reassurance that your company is doing the right things. You go from owning an agency to owning an award-winning agency overnight, and the perceived “value” of you and your business goes up too. Entering just because the owner wants to might be a red flag though.
2) Sales and marketing
Anything that supports your sales and marketing teams will go down well, but especially award wins. It’s content that can be pushed out or splashed all over socials, and it can be mentioned during discovery calls or pitches. It generally makes life easier to have more ammo to target the market with and it’s additional proof points that can be otherwise difficult to find in a competitive industry, even if it’s for 12 months until the next ceremony comes around.
3) Staff and future hires
I always wanted to work for an award-winning agency and naturally, a lot of other people do too. I’ve lost count of the number of interviews I’ve had where a candidate congratulated us or mentioned they had seen an award win when deciding to apply. You can also go through plenty of LinkedIn profiles and see mentions of awards that someone’s agency and/or clients have won as it’s no doubt a highlight and helped them to further their careers (especially in creative roles). This is one of my favourite things about awards, it can have long-lasting effects for lots of people. But at the same time, you can’t expect everyone to care, especially if it wasn’t their client winning or it’s a generic business award, so it’s all relative to what’s in it for the team.
4) Potential clients
There are a number of risks for a business looking to appoint an agency and on their long checklist will be credibility. Awards help, especially the bigger or more relevant the award is to the services or industry specialisms that you’re selling.
Even if you’re one of 100 “award-winning” agencies, that’s a much shorter list to be on than the hundreds of agencies claiming to do exactly the same thing as you, and it makes your agency a less risky choice. This was the real game changer for my current agency after years of anonymity, as plenty of businesses contacted and shortlisted us after simply scrolling through award shortlists, with many of them turning into paying clients too.
The reason this is lower in the list is it’s usually only a foot in the door. These potential clients will no doubt have contacted other winning agencies and there will be a process beyond this that no amount of trophies will help you with.
5) Existing clients
At the bottom of this list are the existing clients. I’m sure other agencies will have had different or maybe better experiences, but a lot of the time, clients don’t really care that they’ve been shortlisted for or even won an award. And why should they?
If the entry is based on a brilliant campaign or strategy that’s generating a lot more money for their business, that’s job done. But the award itself? It’s potentially a mention on the internal team’s CVs for the future and the duplicate trophy can be put somewhere in their office. Clients obviously know why agencies enter these things, and it’s the same reason they enter their own awards in their own industries.
I’ve even had clients that were against entering as it could give away the inner workings of their strategy, and only one or two that were interested in going along to the evening itself as most understandably can’t justify the time away from the office or some simply weren’t interested.
There is a case that an award win backs up the quality of your work and team, but a trophy hasn’t ever stopped a client from leaving so it’s best not to be disillusioned.
Tough at the top
There is a limit to how much impact awards can have on your agency. This might sound like a nice problem to have but it can be counterproductive.
You go from winning your first trophies, getting plenty of attention, seeing job applications flowing in, and picking up the phone to inbound leads, to realising the only direction from here is down.
Once you’ve won a handful of awards, that’s a big box ticked. You can mix it up by entering different clients, different categories, different awarding bodies, or even different services, all of which I’ve tried and done. But after a certain point, you’ll find yourself in a different place when it comes to trying to differentiate your agency.
“We’ve won the most awards out of anyone. We’ve won X award every single year. We’ve won everything possible.”
You’ll have probably seen agencies mention these sorts of things, especially the big ones, and it’s likely because of diminishing returns. It becomes the expectation that you’ll win and if you don’t, does that mean you’re struggling or another agency is now better?
The narrative can change quickly and I’ve actually had a few new business prospects ask why we hadn’t won in a certain year, and one that even asked for the name of the competitor agency who did win our category so they could reach out to them too (seriously).
If you make a big deal about awards, you’re setting high expectations for the agency, team, and clients about what’s important, and it can be both difficult and expensive to maintain this.
Tell a story
When it comes to increasing your chances of winning an award, the best advice I can give is about the entry itself. You win and lose based on this form, regardless of how great your results are, so storytelling is crucial.
Judges have endless documents to go through, so you not only have to clearly and concisely lay out the objectives, how you achieved them, and how your results are better than anyone else in the given category, you have to get the real value and emotion across.
What hurdles or struggles did you come up against? What impact has it really had on the client’s business and people? How is it different compared to other case studies and entries potentially in this category? If you can’t answer these questions, you might want to reconsider entering as vanity metrics, huge numbers, and vague percentages won’t be enough.
There’s always a word count to consider too, but this shouldn’t be a target to hit. If you can say it in fewer words, or with supporting graphics and videos, you should. Don’t assume the results will speak for themselves. You have to spell it out and it’s best to get the team that worked on the campaign or even the client to provide this from their own perspectives, which is sometimes easier said than done.
When we started taking awards seriously, we were shortlisted 15 times across different ceremonies before finally winning one. Each time the entry forms got better and better, not necessarily the results. Our first big agency title win also came after completely changing the focus from headcount growth and revenue, to showing the impact on people and clients (with a supporting video too).
There’s an art to award entries and it would be remiss of me to not mention my wife, who’s an agency marketing and PR specialist and was responsible for the vast majority of my current agency’s wins.
Go big or go home empty handed
It’s important to spread the risk of entering awards as much as possible. If an awards night has 20 categories and an average of 10 nominations for each, you’re looking at 200 opportunities to be shortlisted. Realistically you won’t be able to enter half of them and it’s a game of odds, so entering one client into one category would be less than a 1% chance of success.
Even if it’s your best case study, you can’t guarantee that at least one other agency isn’t going to have something better, and a lot of the time, there are different judges for different categories so you also can’t be sure that your story is going to resonate with every individual.
Go big and enter as many times as you feasibly can with your strongest entries, even if it’s multiple entries in the same category. Some of our wins include occasions where we had two clients in the same category, and times when we didn’t get the award we hoped for but stood out in a less competitive category. It’s particularly effective when you don’t have lots of clients to put forward. Our first seven awards came from just three campaigns, so make the most of the opportunities because getting one solid entry together can be hard enough.
It’s also an unwritten rule, or sometimes an actual requirement, that you have to enter at least one category award to be shortlisted for the overall agency titles. You can usually predict who is going to be the “big winner” on the night based on how many times they’ve been shortlisted or on stage to collect a trophy, which is fair given that quality of work is a big factor in deciding these overall winners. It’s best to not hold your breath if you haven’t been shortlisted in many categories.
This all might feel like an unnecessary cost, but it’s cheaper than walking away with nothing come the end of the night.
Don’t believe the hype
Whether you’re for or against awards, you don’t have to believe the hype.
If another agency wins, it doesn’t diminish the work you’ve done or the effort that’s been put in, and vice versa, a trophy doesn’t make you the best in the entire industry.
At the time of judging, based on those that entered and what was in the entry forms, a group of experts gave their opinion and luck was either on your side or not. That’s it.
Does that take away from the success? Absolutely not.
Awards are one of the only real benchmarks available for agencies and ways to acknowledge what you’ve achieved that year, and if you don’t win, it’s an indication that you can improve in one way or another.
We admired and followed the lead of award-winning agencies, questioned whether our campaigns and strategies were “award worthy”, spent hours going through shortlisted and winning campaigns for inspiration, and ultimately, this pushed us to do bigger and better things.
Success is whatever you define it as, but plenty of agencies buy into awards as an effective way to benchmark and grow. It’s certainly not as easy as you may be led to believe though.
