The Ad Industry Needs Another Award Show.
And here’s how I would do it.
Anyone who’s dipped a toe in modern advertising will tell you, “We have too many award shows.” Ask ten agency folks what’s wrong with the award circuit, and you’ll get eleven different answers—and they’re all correct. It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme… no, it is a pyramid scheme—a pillar of fraud that rewards the ones who game the system, sustained by a foundation of cash, and run by (mostly) shady organisations. The fact that we’ve been having this conversation for years is bonkers. We know the system is broken, but we all kind of play along, because everyone is scared about speaking the open secret.
Well, I’m gonna put myself on a hit-list and say it. Advertising award shows are a steaming pile of fraud. A few truth-bombs for you:
- Vote trading is the warm-up act.
- Jury rigging is practically a requirement.
- Case studies are mostly fiction with a side of fantasy statistics.
- Fake ads, fake campaigns, fake results.
- Save-the-world ads save absolutely nothing except some exec’s ego.
- Exclusive, inaccessible, and downright shady entry fees (see: multi-level marketing).
- Ghost clients haunt the room.
- Ghost campaigns haunt the screen.
- Category manipulation is the new counting-cards.
- Block voting and judges under pressure from their agencies to “do the right thing” (wink, wink).
- Award-bait campaigns don’t actually help the brands .
- Agencies have award quotas (because nothing says “creative integrity” like a corporate KPI). (Source: ask your boss what yours is).
- Many of these shows, including Cannes, are publicly-traded companies.
- Agencies continue to prioritise hiring based on awards rather than talent. Go on LinkedIn right now and look at some posts. Oh, here’s one:
The judging process is about as transparent as a brick wall, and every award show ends in controversy. When any industry leader who doesn’t give a fig about burning bridges anymore tries to speak up, they still get the boot. There’s countless articles, reports, and opinion pieces out there from journalists and industry leaders calling it out. But, nothing has changed?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some award shows with actual merit. The Effies are tough to fool, though not impossible. The One Show is completely non-profit and puts immense resources into supporting the right parts of the industry and running incredible diversity initiatives. The Gerety Awards operates on an all-female jury, and they don’t even mention it—because they’re too busy, you know, doing the right thing without patting themselves on the back.
So I’m not here to just trash every award show because of the worst offenders.
But with so many others, it’s a big bamboozle today. The ad industry, classically accused of selling fraud to consumers, has finally perfected selling fraud to ourselves. In 2019, their ringleader Cannes Lions literally told the judges to judge scams on a sliding scale. Verbatim, the guidelines wrote, “In truth, scam sits on a continuum.”
Case in point: there’s too many award shows. Most of them have lost all integrity and are as credible as a politician’s promise. The few that remain reasonable don’t have enough traction. I used to think the solution was simple: nuke the whole system and start over. Eradicate all the award shows.
No, I have a better idea. We need a new award show.
Stop laughing…
Consumer Choice Awa—, er uh, no…Human Choice Awards!
An award show judged by actual humans.
You me heard right. A jury of real, breathing, sentient humans — we know them as “consumers.” You know, those pesky folks who buy stuff. The ones who install ad-blockers, roll their eyes at our brand promise, and wouldn’t click on a pre-roll if their life depended on it.
They’re everyone except us. Average Joes and Janes walking down the street. The clerk at the grocery store. The person who does your taxes. The bartender, the bookstore owner, the university student who wakes up at 2 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. They’re the most diverse group on the planet. All ages, nationalities, income levels — you name it. They’re our so-called “customer base.” And yet, when we hand out awards for creativity or effectiveness, we don’t ask them what they think. Instead, we sit around in our echo chambers, patting ourselves on the back for ads that nobody outside our bubble gives a fig about.
So, here’s the question: if you wouldn’t trust a politician to grade their own policies, why the hell are we trusting ad agencies to judge their own campaigns? Shouldn’t we be asking the people who are (or aren’t) buying the stuff?
Think of a jury in a courtroom for any given reason — selected at random. They do a general vetting to make sure none of them are crazy, racist, or have a background that could interfere with a fair outcome. Beyond that, you’ve got somebody’s babushka sitting between a 22-year-old crypto fanatic and a guy who runs a car dealership and does crossfit with his second wife. That’s your ad show jury.
The Jury Dynamic
One simple qualification — no background in marketing or advertising. That opens our jury to be the most diverse on the planet—because that’s almost everyone. Your judge could be a wealthy London banker or a German university freshman surviving on a diet of ramen and Red Bull. They might be an 88-year-old retiree in Japan or a bus driver in Brazil. They might be a butcher or a vegan. Because guess what? That’s how the real world works. This is how people see ads.
No cherry-picking judges for specific categories*. Your ad for auto insurance might get reviewed by a Gen Z vegan or a boomer who still thinks a fax machine is cutting-edge. Your pre-packaged meat commercial might land in front of a jury with a few vegetarians. Why? Again, that’s how the real world works. This is how people see ads. Not everyone who sees your ad is in your target demographic. The award show should be no different.
Selecting Judges
To eliminate vote trading, insider knowledge, voter pressure, etc., the jury wouldn’t be announced until the day of judging. Juries would be selected at random, and their demographics — identity protected for privacy — could be made public in a neat little graph. So, you’ll know that your ad was judged by, say, 46% men, 47% women, and 7% non-binary folks. But you won’t know who they are, where they’re from, or what their spiritual beliefs are.
The only criteria for judges are:
- No background in advertising or marketing — let’s kill the bias.
- Over 18 years old —you’re not even supposed to be advertising to kids.
This criteria exists in every conceivable population on the planet.
Jury backgrounds would be selected based on UN global demographic data, including the World Bank and WHO, ensuring equal representation among the jury to reflect the world’s population across four key points:
- Gender and gender/sexual identity.
- Ethnic background.
- Age.
- Socioeconomic class.
You might have a jury that’s 14% LGBTQIA+, 25% East Asian, 35% under 30, and 50% with an income under $40k. And some of those categories will overlap. Because, again, welcome to the real world.
*The Only Hand-Selection
The one exception to cherry-picking within categories would be to ensure that cultural nuances and audience relevancy are respected and understood on a larger scale. If your ad is targeted at the Indian subcontinent, your jury should reflect who actually saw your ad in the real world—within reason. It wouldn’t make sense for a snowblower ad to be judged by people from Costa Rica who’ve never seen snow. But everything else?
Everything else is totally random.
Submission Guidelines
1: Categories:
Categories would be simplified to three divisions, and you can enter only one per division.
- Craft Genre: Humor, emotional, informative, etc.
- Ad Medium: TV, print, social, activation, etc.
- Client Category: Automotive, people services, nonprofit, pharma, etc.
So you’ve got three categories, each separated entirely in context, and every campaign is limited to one submission per slice. You can’t submit into informative and humor, or video and social just because it ran on both. There’s no need for 27 categories and spamming all of them.
2: Can and can’ts
All those overinflated stats and dubious metrics you love to tout? Gone. Keep your insights and brand mission if you must, but all that “850% increase in engagement” and “over 90 million downloads in one hour” nonsense? Cropped out. Consumers never see that when the ad is running, and we wouldn’t want judges to be biased on numbers they’ve never seen. And we all know those numbers are as solid as a house of cards, anyway.
It eliminates false success stories, and also gives small agencies and independent entrants a chance to go up against big agencies and networks on a more even field. Joe & Jane’s Ad Factory with three clients and enough cash to buy a used Toyota wouldn’t lose an award because some WPP agency dropped seven figures on media buying in the same category.
3: Real stuff.
Proof that the work actually ran needs to be heavily regulated. I mean heavily. But, that’s not really that hard to prove, despite what Cannes will tell you. Show the bill. If you’re a small local agency and ran your work in a single local paper, because that’s your audience and your budget, you shouldn’t get penalised for that—you should be included. If you’re a massive network running a massive brand’s ad in a single brochure at a single corner store, everyone smells the bullshit. You’re out.
Judging Criteria
Two things matter here: effectiveness and likability. No, not creativity — likability. Four points to determine this, because less is more:
- Did the jury enjoy it, on a sliding scale.
- Did it improve or reduce their opinion of the product or cause—regardless of if you knew the brand beforehand or not?
- Is it clear what the product or brand is?
- Would they consider buying or supporting the product or cause, or recommending to someone else, based on the ad?
And that’s it. It’s entirely possible that a banal ad with strong brand retention gets an award. Meanwhile, your ultra-creative, avant-garde masterpiece might bomb if it doesn’t move the needle where it matters. It could have subtly positive effect but be hilarious, you get points for that. But if everyone smells fake activism, it goes where it belongs: up your___.
Most of all, it would make ads work the way they should. It would make them enjoyable, it would make them effective. Agencies who want ads to win awards would actually aim for making good ads.
Stop laughing.
There you have it. Sure, it might need some tweaking from the pros. But that’s the cocktail napkin pitch, if the napkin was more like a roll of butcher paper.
The Reality
Look, I’m not really saying we should actually do this. I mean, I’d be down if I had the resources and some like-minded industry rebels willing to throw down. Maybe do a small test in a single market. Or we could—no, no, let’s be real: this would get steamrolled by the current award show mafia. They’d bury it faster than you can say “scampaign.” And everyone reading this will probably think of their portfolio and say, “But I have this ad that worked! And it would never win in this kind of show!”
Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped for a minute and asked consumers what they really think of our ads?
I know I come off like a grinch complaining about the ad industry, there’s no shortage of that. Shouting into the wind that award shows are not just a thorn in the ass, but full cirrhosis of the ad industry’s liver, well, we’re everywhere. But don’t get me wrong, I love working in this industry. I love making fun work, and I get to be creative. I get to be around creative people. But… but,
