Shut up. Advertising Awards are great!

Sour Grapes? No way!

I see a lot of award bashing all around. Some people are calling them retarded and some have listed down logical reasons why they don’t work well or are unfair. I love advertising awards, having won 2 recently. Here is a list of reasons that would convert the most determined of naysayers.

1. Awards provide legitimate reasons for everyone in the agency to get drunk – either to celebrate or to curse the organizers.
2. All the bosses fly away to France so the office is more chilled out.
3. Only real work is celebrated. Scam ads are just a myth. Nobody makes scam ads. I’ve never seen one.
4. Paying out bonuses to the hard working folks is such a retarded idea. Spending millions on award entries is an investment.
5. Working on this year’s award entries sharpen your skills – so that you can do a better job for next year’s award entries. Real work? What’s that? Oh! That silly stuff clients pay for…clients are silly – they don’t even know what to pay for.
6. All awards are judged fairly. The judges are genuine and any correlation with the numbers of wins going up due to someone from the group chairing the awards or a category is just coincidence. People who say otherwise are just sore losers.
7. Agencies that decide not to participate in awards are short sighted and do not care about the glory they can bring to their clients.
8. The small agencies that cannot afford to spend the money to participate and fly down dozens of folks for the awards don’t deserve to win. (There is a reason why they are small, right?)
9. Effectiveness? What’s that got to do with awards? Oh! You mean how good is your conversion. Yes, how else would you judge the planners?
10. Not convinced? Come on! Don’t be a spoilport! Well you don’t need to be – just because you did not win at one award show? There are 39 of them. Everyone wins. I don’t know of any agency that has not won awards.

Can you think of more?