Award-Spinning.

My Uber to JFK this morning, Saturday, May 23, was like every other trip I've ever taken to Kennedy. There are uglier stretches of road in the world than the Van Wyck, which connects the Grand Central to the airport, but there aren't many. Driving past the oil refineries and swamps of New Jersey is ugly. The highways around Gary, Indiana on the way to Chicago, past shuttered steel mills and belching refineries is ugly. The Alexander Avenue shortcut through the South Bronx has potholes that could swallow all the obesity in all the Golden Corrals in all of Cincinnati.

As the ad industry--the calamitously shrinking ad industry enters yet another award season, it staggers me that so many still hold onto awards as a measure of success. Especially as the winning of awards seems inversely related to the solvency of an agency's business. WPP, which has seen its market cap drop by well-over 80-percent, and which has shed over 100,000 employees over the last decade is still boasting about various "Blank of the Year" accolades. 

There are two ways of thinking about awards. I grew up in the first camp.

1. You create and sell the best work you possibly can for the client. It wins an award.

2. You create work to win an award and hope to sell it to a client.

More and more the industry follows the second tack. I'll say nothing more about that systemic prevarication other than it's destroyed any credibility the industry once had. 

As an industry, we are seen as self-serving, not customer-serving.

Agencies used to be know for the good work they did for long-time clients.

BBDO: Pepsi, FedEx, Visa.
Chiat\Day: Apple, Energizer.
Ogilvy: IBM, American Express.
McCann: MasterCard.

Today an agency or network will trumpet some award they've won, and about a week later, you'll read in the trades that the account has left the agency that concocted the award-winning work for another agency

This is on VML's website. It's purportedly for Oreo.

This was in Crain's as the above was still on VML's site.

But back to the Van Wyck and the pervasive perniciousness of the phrase award-winning. Jamaica Hospital abuts the Van Wyck. It's facade is shrouded in a giant banner that says award-winning. 

Stuck in traffic I tried to imagine the entry forms for hospitals might fill out to win these awards. I tried to fathom what all this awarding means. If I were shot in the chest and bleeding while out in Queens, if I were in a 97-car pile-up, if I hantavrused from some street meat, would I tell the ambulance driver to keep going--until he hits an "award-winning" hospital?

Besides, I don't think there's a hospital, an ad agency, a holding company, an ACD, a copywriter, art director, strategist, project manager or night-watchman working at anywhere in amerikkka who at this point is not award winning.

That's why I'm thinking of changing my LinkedIn moniker to something equally ridiculous and equally-applicable to everyone.

George Tannenbaum
Carbon-based bi-pedal life-form.