Taking home the trophy
In a feature that first appeared in Encore, Brooke Hemphill speaks to award winners and the jurors who chose them to find out the best way to maximise your awards haul.
The importance of awards to the communications industry is evident by the placement of trophies in the offices of agencies across the country. At the headquarters of one Sydney organisation, even the wallpaper has pictures of Cannes Lions on it and you’d be hard pressed to find a desk or shelf that isn’t sporting a One Show gold pencil – or 10.
Ralph van Dijk, founder of creative sound agency Eardrum and winner of multiple awards including Sirens, Lions and AWARD awards, says: “Awards are important for business and personal reasons. We get work from advertisers, and their agencies, and advertisers are motivated by effectiveness – they know that creative, original thinking in their ads gives them more cut through. Our award success gives them confidence in that, but then you’ve got the agencies and they need awards to improve their profile and get on pitch lists.” That’s clearly the business reason and as for the personal, van Dijk says: “Truly creative people aren’t usually motivated by money. We prefer acknowledgment and appreciation for the things that we make. If we were motivated by money you’d ask the ECD to scrap the awards budget and just pay us all a Christmas bonus but I’ve never heard a creative team say that.” Michael Ritchie of production house Revolver, whose awards haul includes Cannes Lions, trophies from the UK’s D&AD awards, a CLIO or two, One Show pencils and AWARD awards, agrees that award shows are important for the industry. He says: “They’ve become more important than ever because they’re an aggregator of the work that we all do. There’s so much scope to the different kinds of things that we’re doing in the marketing and commercial communications area that award shows have become really useful in actually pulling all that stuff together in one sphere. They really are more useful than they’ve ever been.”
Elsewhere in the business, a film and television industry figure who was involved in this year’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards says: “In an age where there’s so much noise, a respected organisation holding up prime examples of the best of their industry is fantastic.”
