<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Guest Article, Alvin Saldanha:</B></FONT> And the winner is...

Alvin Saldanha

Madison Communications

And so it finally happened... agencies banded together to get the Abbies’ attention. One would have thought that it all would have gotten acrimonious and, being on one of the juries, I was expecting some skewed moments at the judging. But nothing happened. I was on the radio jury and it was a most civil judging exercise and immaculately professional to the core: you-know-who won a gold, too!

So, with this year, the already charged issue of awards has taken on a new heat. Will one agency sweep the show? But wait a moment, even if it does, we cannot ascribe it to lack of competition. The entire hand-wringing on us today is because this one agency swept it every year, while every other agency in India was very much competing. Such is the situation that even if they do not sweep it this year, the agency with the highest tally can’t really cast itself as the only creative alternative in town.

It is worth our while to ask: How did we get here? What is it about awards that have made them such a life-and-death issue? Are awards merely a self-indulgence that has gone out of control all across the world?

Look closely and you will see staring at you the simple fact that self-indulgence is the least of the pleasures of awards. Awards simply end up bringing in business and the truckloads of money that follow new business. Awards are not the creative department pleasuring itself … the entire agency gains a hundredfold with every single win.

The first reason awards are so priceless is that an award is that incontestable argument that closes a sale with finality. What could be more valuable in an industry where every moment is soaked in the dynamic of selling? We are selling the agency at a pitch, selling the creative idea at a brainstorming, selling a line to an art director, selling a visual idea to a writer, selling the execution to a creative director, selling the work to clients. An award almost doubles as a barometer that could not have been corrupted by bias, especially useful, for example, at a pitch, where it neatly telegraphs that an agency has pitted its pure creative power against every other agency and been judged by a body of peers to be in possession of a superior grade of creativity.

Imagine the quandary of a client at a pitch: Ten agencies all touting philosophies, histories, brands, people… who on earth could possibly decipher this self-congratulatory deluge? The agency that says its creative work has earned more awards than the other nine makes it all so simple.

Carry this a bit deeper and you know that the most vexing part of advertising is that it is a universe of judgement calls. Advertising is anything but an exact science. Every single decision taken is a decision in deference to an opinion. More often than not, nobody is really interested in the logic of a case being made, they just want assurance that that logic can be trusted. It is at such a moment that the ‘award winning’ opinion comes into its own.

Good advertising requires leaps of trust in someone else’s judgement from conception to release, and those leaps of trust are at the mercy of a dozen contrary questionings, innocent and mischievous, all down the line. When an award winning man clears his throat, the self-indulgent babble subsides, the die is all but cast, and the work stands just so sold. You cannot place a value on this kind of clout, and this kind of clout cannot be had in this manner, unless you have a very big stick in your hand. And for us in advertising, the stick is awards. Awards are, in the final reckoning, one of the most powerful components of your revenue model.

Every single award earns money: An awards roster makes your pitch a weightier one, an awards record earns you speaking rights when selling good work, an awards promise attracts creative talent, an awards commitment retains creative talent. It’s all, in one way or another, cool cash, baby, and the more awards you win, the richer you get in every possible way.

Second, awards are the handiest device to grade and establish your creative mojo. Win one, and you are ready to be ranked. Two, and you are marked for greatness. Three, and you can look every other award winner of any kind in the eye. Then there is that nice, chunky metal on your table. You can touch and feel your talent (however naughty that sounds). Someone else can touch and feel your talent (yes, yes, I know it sounds naughty, now pipe down).

I remember when I first saw the Cannes Lion that Prasoon had brought home. I asked to hold it. I measured it, hefting its weight in my hands. I looked at it, and I imagined the Lion looked back with a condescending air. I remember thinking: Man, this is the thing. And this is what Prasoon is all about.

I watched as Prasoon’s shelves got so crowded, the walls looked wallpapered in metal. To walk into an office like that is to be visually assaulted with a staggering display of creative commendations from every corner of the world. Kind of silences you quite nicely.

Third: Awards can be, often, the only redeeming part of an advertising creative person’s life. Yes, joy-of-creativity-brand-building-good-money blah blah blah, but for all the exhausting nights of work, the loneliness of coming up with an idea, the brutal and unrelenting pressure of originating fresh, ground-breaking work every single day, there simply isn’t anything that compares to the clean and clear moment of achievement, celebration and peer acknowledgement that walking onstage can bring.

Period.

Which brings us to the hot point of the day: O&M and awards. I am reminded of a caustic comment held up by an American protester of the Iran war: How did our oil get under their sand? Is O&M the evil, wicked, conniving villain that wins only because it blocks, if not frustrates, everyone else’s ability to win?

Look back a decade and you will realise that somewhere in the early 1990s, a decision was taken at O&M, a decision the prescience of which has now been proved a hundredfold. Someone decided to entrust the agency’s creative standards to Piyush Pandey, and decided to back that decision with everything it took, price no object, to fulfil the creative agenda. It fell to Piyush to create a grand conception and the man fulfilled it in spades. Prasoon Joshi is doing just that at McCann, and look what has happened: The only other creative person to capture our industry’s imagination quite like Piyush has done is Prasoon Joshi.

Did you think what the award winning agencies do is merely generate a truckload of scam and enter it shotgun style? Think again. And did you really think that if we confiscated the entire annual budget earmarked for awards at O&M and handed it to just any other agency in India, they could handily duplicate the O&M track record? I put it to you that it wouldn’t happen.

The hard fact is that every single day of every single year, O&M has created an entire award winning culture, a ground-up momentum that includes every single person in the agency, and has backed that culture at an enormous cost, year after relentless year, for an entire decade. In fact, it is the O&M take on living that can take credit for maturing the entire Indian advertising industry in its wake, and enforcing on us an upgrade in creative quality that was long overdue.

But we should be gratified and excited with the stand that the dissenting agencies took this year. What that stand has achieved is to begin to create the space for a more equal competition. The taking of this stand and the self-denial of participation is a price to pay in its own right, and it is a worthy price worthily paid. The changes in judging and ruling that it has enforced should hopefully cause a more level playing field. And the stand has been taken well – for a correct cause, in the correct spirit. The abstaining agencies have participated professionally, graciously and with abundant fairness in the judging, if the radio jury is any indication (and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t). In fact, with the same sentiment that one does not deny O&M their fabulous success, one should not deny the dissenting agencies kudos for the bullet they have bitten.

But that doesn’t change a fascinating dilemma: What now? Has one single agency’s juggernaut been adequately slowed? How does an agency now make a worthy utilisation of the space that has been earned at such a price? Let’s not lose track of the fact that what is now needed is to pay the remainder of the price. Which, at one end, means that the agencies should back their creative people by putting their money where their mouths are and then back their creative officers by helping them galvanise the entire agency behind a creative agenda. If we don’t do that, ladies and gentlemen, we will have wasted what has been so dearly won this year… And only we will be to blame.

Psst. AAAI. There’s the beginning of a wonderful solution, if we have the wit to capitalise on it.

(The writer is chief creative officer at Madison Communications. You can write to him at alvin@madisonindia.com.)

© 2006 agencyfaqs!