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On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, I judged 3 categories for the 2008 DMA Awards. Sworn to secrecy on pain of death, I can’t mention a thing about the work I judged suffice to say that I saw some truly outstanding work. Every year, I join fellow members of judging panels from agency and client side and we tear into every entry like a pack of wolves. How anything survives is sometimes amazing. If outsiders really saw how brutal the process is and how many flaming hoops each piece has to jump through, I think there’d be a few shocked faces and a real genuine pride in the work that wins. It is one hell of an achievement to win a DMA and I’m not sure everyone really understands this.

When the shortlist is made, around 7 to 10 entries are cast on the floor in front of the hungry panel eager to see if their chosen ones made it through. I like to think that I know the great from the good/average and I generally have about a 90% success rate of choosing the shortlisted few. But when it comes to the debate, boy is it passionate. Only the strongest survive. Only the ones who really do tick those three boxes – strategy, creativity and results. I was due to enter a radio and DM campaign in three categories this year but results-wise, it just wasn’t up to it. And you knew full well that some bugger would see straight through my wishy-washy words in the ROI bit.

Many a mind has been changed for or against an entry after an empassioned plea by a juror. No one in the room knows the final result but everyone is sure of one thing – whatever is voted Gold, Silver or Bronze, it bloody well deserves it.

This year more than any other, I think I was re-energised about our industry by some great workand subtley warned that I had to raise the bar yet again!

It really is a privilege judging awards – one I would recommend to anyone but not perhaps the faint-hearted…

Chris Catchpole, Creative Consultant, Chairman of the DMA Creative Forum

P.S. Don’t forget 9 December – Awards night at the glorious Grosvenor House.

Check out this post on the Osocio blog for a classic reaction to successful charity DRTV.

Yes, we’d all like charity DRTV to be groundbreaking, challenging, new and different. But I’ve never heard of anything succeeding that doesn’t follow the same formula as all these ads. Problem: solution. Eye contact. Rousing music. Earnest voiceover. Repeat the number. Repeat the number. Repeat the number.

Have you?

Reuben

I’m delighted that the DMA has finally decided to take digital seriously, with its ‘revamped’ awards for 2008.

A little bit late to the party, perhaps, but better late than never.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article for the agency blog about how DM was failing miserably to embrace digital.

I thought then – and I still do – that digital belongs to us. After all, we already understand the idea of bringing brands to life; the importance of involvement and engagement; the secret of getting people to do something. We know all about targeting and measurement and testing.

Combine that with the expertise of online practitioners - interaction designers, information architects, developers – and I think you’ve got something special in the making. And something that sits right in the middle of our domain.

So why have we been so reluctant to grab the opportunity? (more…)

It was The Precision Marketing Awards the other evening. We were nominated in the Best Integrated Campaign category. It’s always nice have your agency’s name read out at these events, better still taking the walk to the podium. As usual, there was a mixture of ‘well done, great work’ and ‘well who would have thought that’d win’…

I used to be an old cynic when it came to awards – a love/hate relationship. As much as I wanted to mock the chumminess, the ‘I’ll vote for you if you vote for me’ set, the correlation between those who judged the awards and those who won the awards, the dodgy tactical voting, you still can’t beat the feeling when your agency’s name is read out a few seconds before the overall result. (more…)

Do you tell everyone outside our industry that you work in advertising? It’s just a bit easier than explaining that you work in direct marketing, isn’t it? And of course it means you don’t have to suffer the ignominy of everyone thinking you do “junk mail”.

Right now, it seems more socially acceptable to be an England footballer than a direct marketer. Junk mail is right at the top of everyone’s hate list. A couple of years ago BBC’s Watchdog programme ran a feature on the things that annoy us most (or more accurately the things that most annoy the people who can be bothered to vote in a BBC Watchdog poll). Anyway, top of the list - worse than insurance companies who wriggle out of paying up – was junk mail.

Now if you’ve ever had to deal with an insurance company who just won’t pay up for some spurious reason (and I have), you’ll know it takes hours and days of phone calls and letter writing and weeks and months of frustration and stress. That strikes me as ever so slightly more annoying than getting some unsolicited direct mail through your letterbox. Still, the public have spoken. And they hate junk mail.

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