Insights

If you want your campaigns to win awards……

I was honoured to be asked by the Drum magazine to judge the entries for the Drum Network awards.

judge the Drum entries for the Drum Network awards. In fact I was asked to be the chairman of the awards and even got to nominate my favourite campaign. Firstly it’s hard work reading a huge number of entries so make it easy for the judges. Reading through the various entries submitted by agencies was fascinating. Some of the entries were fantastic and some….were less fantastic.

I thought I’d share my observations with you about how to increase your chances of winning an award whether from the Drum or elsewhere.

Here are my top tips if you decide to enter one of your agency’s campaigns for an award.

1. Take it seriously. Don’t delegate it to a junior member of the team. The judges were all senior and highly experienced and therefore the language needs to resonate with them. If it’s worth entering, it’s worth the senior agency person on the account to write it.
2. Make sure the campaign’s objectives match with the results. You might think is obvious. So did I but several entries make this schoolboy error.
3. Testimonials from the client add real credibility to your entry.
4. To me the number of tweets or likes on Facebook are not convincing by themselves of the efficacy of a campaign. Give me hard business results: sales or sales increases, increases in new customers, increases in market share etc.
5. Entries with videos highlighting the campaign are hard work to produce but really help to sell an award entry.

Finally please run your entry through “Spell-check” and get a colleague to read it through!