Four OMDers judged the Internet Advertising Bureau awards today and it was a very interesting experience, especially comparing the way it works with the Media Federation Awards. Whilst we are prohibited from commenting on any specific entries or - of course - revealing the winners, I thought there were some good learnings for future digital award entries.
The majority of the entries had at least one significant hole in their story. By that I mean you are looking for a case which had clear challenge, interesting insights, which leads to innovative digital execution and then well evidenced results.
With all awards it is hard to find the perfect case study that has all of the above. But ultimately that kind of all round greatness is what we are searching for.
A couple of areas were the most challenging:
45% of the marks were for results and this was a challenging area as there was no requirement to rule out other factors, so when digital is given as say 27% of spend, and the results are for the campaign as a whole it makes it difficult.
As to having a compelling insight that drove the strategy and execution in surprising directions, there very few of the 40 entries I read that had a good insight. This backs up my long held view that digital strategies in Australia, and probably the world over, have a worrying lack of consumer insight.
One surprise was that Facebook only got mentioned once - every recommendation seems to have Facebook in it these days, but it has not been making it into the final strategies in the last 12 months. Social media was fairly well used though with MySpace and YouTube featuring fairly prominently.
Overall I personally found it a great experience to see all the digital work from agency land in Australia. There was lots of solid work - if few outstandingly brilliant ones. And the focus on business results whilst not being perfect took us a long way further than endless claims of click rates, PIs, UBs and time spent.
Moving forward, strategists have a special role to play in the digital space: the possibilities are so much more varied than with other media that you can't just have digital as a translation of your offline strategy any more, you need to find specific "ways in" to the consumer using the unique properties of digital media.
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1 comment:
from my room, one thing stood out... a few judges were very focussed on whether a campaign appealed to them as a consumer as opposed to the target audience it was aimed at. makes you wonder whether some campaigns that clearly won't appeal to the kind of folks that sit on juding panels get skipped over simply because they appeal to a different kind of folk??
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