From the Northern Lights Business Support team in UCLan, we would like to congratulate grouphub on a very successful event last night.

A great blend and mix on the panel and an excellent turnout.

Northern Lights are about to launch awards of their own very soon, so it was great to get a better insight into how the creative industries view them.

Well done.

The DBA Effectiveness Awards
The Sun Awards
Big Chip - Digital Industry Awards for the North West
British Interactive Media Association (BIMA)
The Roses Design Awards
The Cream Awards
The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries (DADI Awards)
DA&D Global Awards (and student)
The Chip Shop awards
Creativity Works
Royal Television Society North West Awards
SWAT

20.01.08
The annual cocktail of fear and loathing

Dandad_money

‘Is there any point in entering? Will it win?’

These are the words rumbling through the worlds’ creative directors heads, because, if you needed any reminding, it’s awards season.

The season when polyboard sales rocket, for one month only. The season of internal spats as teams lobby for pieces to be entered. The season of huge spikes of activity on company credit cards, for no discernable return.

Well, there must be a return, surely? But having been entering awards for years, and sipping this annual cocktail of fear and loathing (coupled with an increased dissatisfaction at the scale and cost) I’m beginning to wonder.

You’ve got to be pretty strong to resist the lure of the schemes now paraded in front of us. One London based magazine says it will award the prize of design company of the year to the company that gets the most entries into its scheme. That sounds fair enough but have a look at the small print and at £100 a pop, that’s quite a pricey way to get PR. And, you could argue, a dubious basis to make that kind of decision upon – the true ‘design company of the year’ may not have a spare £700 to enter all its best projects, after all.

Another London based magazine started it own awards table back in the nineties that tots up awards won and allocates points on a slightly schizophrenic basis, so that winning silver at the Art Directors Club of Guadalupe could actually win you a point in the scheme. And if you win best of show, well…

I’m making light of this because we’ve never taken it that seriously, but I’m beginning to think I’m in a minority. As I filled out my forms for D&AD (still probably the scheme most would prefer to win) last week, I made the fatal error of letting my ‘5 good projects’ rule slip slightly and before I knew it I’d racked up a thousand pounds on entries. Ouch.

But then a few emails dribbled in from around town and I began to learn that several firms were spending many, many thousands just on single schemes. I’d heard the rumour years ago that one well-known London design firm had spent £8,000 entering D&AD one year – now it seems those days are back. To put things into perspective with our advertising cousins, I remember the pain of my bottom jaw hitting a boardroom table as I learnt that a major London advertising agency had an awards budget of nearly a quarter of a million pounds. They were grumbling that the recession of the time (2002) had meant a cut in the budget, down to a paltry one-hundred thousand. What a drag.

These eye-watering stats highlight the reality that in advertising, awards are big business. Getting your agency, or worldwide conglomerate, high up the tables in schemes like The Gunn Report, has become deadly serious. The agency gong of choice seems to be slowly switching to Cannes, where the Golden Lions seem to be gaining ground on the Yellow Pencils as a marker of creativity. As Cannes gets stronger, more clients get involved, so Cannes gets stronger still, and it all ratchets up from there.

You could see awards mania taking over in design as well. If some of the numbers I’ve heard about this week are true, then some London design firms must be spending well over 10k a year entering awards, and I could imagine that some are approaching the wage of a junior designer in money spent. And that’s before shelling out on the warm chardonnay, chicken kiev and the chance to sit next to the paper rep to discuss grammage and opacity.

Some designers are pretty honest about their flirtation with awards. Quentin Newark of Atelier Works admitted that they changed tack as regards awards a few years back – ‘from reluctant, intermittent entering, we switched to enthusiastic, comprehensive entering, and bits of paper started streaming in. Regional, typographic, Dutch and American awards were particularly prolific. Did we make anything of it? No. Do we do it now? No.’

Most design companies of any repute will have considered the idea of taking awards more seriously, but probably backed away due to the pain of entering and the ever-escalating costs.

The reason why some of the figures I’ve mentioned are getting into silly numbers is not because firms are actually doing 20 great projects a year, but because of a phenomenon known as ‘multi-entering’ (some people more cruelly use terms like ‘spray and prey’ or ‘blanket bombing’). This is a trick used by awards stalwarts, who, having produced a good project involving decent design, photography, writing and illustration will then merrily enter it into four different categories. The thinking behind this is that not every jury will hate it and it’s bound to impress someone, somewhere. And you can see the logic of this, I guess, but take your 5 best and start multi-entering and you can see how those numbers rack up.

I’ve seen this back-fire on people though – on one judging scheme we all arrived back for day two (to view shortlisted pieces) and discovered that three or four juries had put the same piece through. This made the juries feel manipulated, the piece was taken out of most of them and didn’t win.

But the discernable reason for all of this, and for this staggering spend, is that some people are seeing it as money well spent. Think about it – employing a decent PR firm will cost you at least 10k a year, but blanket bomb a magazine’s awards scheme with enough good entries and you’ll guarantee some column inches, maybe even an article, and that may ‘only’ cost you 2k. Blitz D&AD with entries and maybe garner a few nominations and you’ll get some peer respect. Enter some of those other ‘easy’ ones and you’ll pad out your year with some decent numbers (not forgetting that new scheme in Guadalupe). Win big and it’s show-time and you can stick ‘London’s most creative’ on your email sign-offs. Keep it up for three years and you’ll be ‘world’s most creative’ (although those tekkies at Apple might give you a run for your money). OK, so it may cost the salary of another designer but what the heck.

You know what? I think I’d just prefer to employ another designer.

Michael Johnson