The statues are stacked in neat rows along office walls. It’s come to define our industry. Kids are told they need to win ’em to impress the creative director and secure that job. Creative directors are told they need to win ’em to impress the MD and prove their relevance in a competitive industry. MDs care because they are told the talent cares, and with a bit of spin and a celebratory lunch, the client might be induced to care, too.
That’s a lot of caring taking place right there, so why am I seeing more and more stories along the lines of ‘Death to Design Awards’, published on the influential design blog Design Observer, or “What’s wrong with advertising award shows?”, published on Adsoftheworld?
I suspect the centre of the industry is moving. Moving on, to be precise. The Great Recession, as the last economic crisis is increasingly being called, changed our industry more than it might care to admit.
It has put consumers firmly back on the agenda of brand managers, who wants agencies to forget about awards and stay focused instead on the strategic importance of the conversation that gets people engaged with a brand – and keeps them engaged.
The realisation that organisations need more honest, and thanks to the rise of social media, intimate, relationships with consumers, translated into the realisation that marketers needed more intimate relationships with their agencies. This back to ‘people basics’ continues to have a knock-on effect, as agencies are coming to realise the need for a more intimate relationship (as opposed to relations, stop sniggering) with their own people.
A key point made across the board by the teams behind this year’s most interesting agency launches – and 2010 saw a good haul of them, from Livio Tronchin, Myles Hoppe and Mark Stead at Derrick and Ben Wren and Michael van den Heerik at 60layers, to Mike Abel and his team at M&C Saatchi Abel – is that agencies no longer sustain intimate relationships with clients. This disconnect drove these entrepreneurs, all passionate advertising people, perfectly understandably, to seek a model that allows them to reconnect with the people they do business with. Creativity in isolation offers less and less reward it seems.
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