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Bowl Leader
Bowl Leader
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Mentor
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Bowl Leader
Also, you need to be exceptional at “networking” 😉 with the judges. A lot of horse trading in the back rooms, and it’s really gross to watch.
Make your own proactive briefs.
Mentor
It can boil down to so many things: favoritism amongst the award chasing ECD’s / factions of the agency, creatives being proactive and bringing great ideas forward, sometimes it’s a bake off on a predetermined “for good” type client brief, sometimes it’s just honest to goodness good client work. The one thing consistent award winners seem to share is the dogged pursuit of award winning type work. Often that can lead to a lower batting average, but that’s the trade off.
In my experience too pro-active stuff goes into this weird space where it floats until it dies. It’s too much of a bet. I still do it, but it hasn’t converted once in my career.
I feel the most succesful way for me has been having the luck that a regular briefing turns into something award winning.
So at least the pro-active work shows my CDs/ECD/CCO what kinda work I wanna do. So when interesting briefs come by they think of me. That’s the biggest benefit I’ve seen so far.
Yes definitely need to be mindful of budgets for proactive stuff. Try to keep it cheap enough that it’s not a huge risk for them. And the strategic sell in for “why should we do this” is important, which is why it helps if you’re already working on the business and know the context.
The key is, if you do this and start small and notch up some wins, get press, make them look good - they become a lot more open to buying bigger things.
I worked on one client years ago where we pitched a $10k proactive idea, which went well and paved the way to pitch a $100k proactive idea, and pretty soon we got $1m+ on a proactive idea that got massive press and won big at Cannes. All that to say it can be done, it just takes a lot of patience and nurturing relationships and building up the small wins into bigger wins.
I think most often it’s having an idea for something without anyone asking for it, let alone handing you a brief
I really try to, and cool things do get through. If the idea is great, that’s the one we go with. But in the end, the client has to want to spend that money on it. Overall I’m not really an awards-first ECD. I like winning them, but get a lot more happiness out of making things that people out there love. And I actually have a bit of a problem with people winning for bs work, then getting big jobs where everyone finds out the hard way that they don’t know how to make real work
Don’t wait for a brief. Bring things you believe are good ideas the client should do.
Seems to be a lot easier to have the idea first and then find a client for it, than produce the award-winning idea for a live client brief that’s had its limitations applied first.
Lots of resistance comes from clients who want ‘proof’ of performance, rather than some whimsical esoteric judge-friendly cool idea. Which makes sense since they’re the ones paying $ that they’re responsible for.
We all know the awards-industrial complex is crashing mightily right? As the industry descends into tailspin, the industry awarding itself with trophies that exalt fraudulent or ineffective work only hastens the decline in value we offer to the people that pay for our services.