Advertising Age has just published "The Creativity Awards Report" http://adage.com/agencynews/article?article_id=139270 which counts which agency, which network and which creatives won the most awards in the past year. What you'll see if you read Ad Age's reporting is some staggering and some staggeringly silly numbers. Agencies winning literally hundreds or in some cases thousands of awards for their efforts.
Years ago, Milwaukee had a disproportionate number of award-winning advertising agencies. I had to fly to Milwaukee for some reason and could hardly wait to pick up the local papers in the morning and look at all the brilliant advertising. D'ya know what I found? Crap. Crap. And more crap. Falling leaves and headlines like "Rake in the savings."
Which leads me to ask, if agencies can win all these awards, why when you turn on the TV, go online, or read a newspaper or magazine do we not see this work? Why do we see absolute insulting banality?
Undoubtedly, the proliferation of award shows leads to the proliferation of awards. But something is going on in our industry that undercuts the very legitimacy of what we do. Our focus is perverted--on winning industry awards rather than on helping industries. Our two principle advertising trade magazines are culpable as well. They know if they wank-off the major agencies, they will get media dollars from the major agencies.
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Above is a picture of Idi Amin. As you can tell from his uniform, he also was highly awarded.
