What Is The Real Cost Of Chasing Awards?

A trophy silhouette on a plinth casting a shadow far longer and heavier than the trophy itself

The defence of chasing awards is sound and worth stating first. They are how creative reputation gets established, how junior people become hireable outside their own building, and how an agency proves a claim that is otherwise unprovable.

The case against is rarely made properly either, because it usually arrives as cynicism about scam ads. That is the least interesting version of the problem, and it distracts from the ordinary cost, which is paid by agencies doing nothing improper at all.

What chasing awards reorganises

Attention, mostly. In any agency there is a finite amount of senior creative time, and awards season redirects a disproportionate share of it towards a small number of entries and away from the accounts that pay for the building.

That is a defensible trade if it is a decision. It usually is not one. It happens by gravity, because the awardable brief is more interesting than the retainer, and the people who choose what to work on are the same people whose reputations the awards serve.

The distribution problem underneath

Every agency has a category of work that will never win anything: the annual price-off campaign, the compliance-heavy category, the client who genuinely just needs the thing on time.

Someone does that work. In most agencies it is disproportionately the same people, and they are less visible at review time, because visibility in a creative department is heavily correlated with having been on the interesting brief. That is a promotion problem dressed as a taste problem.

An agency that only knows how to recognise awardable work will slowly stop being able to see the people holding the rest of it up.

What a healthier version looks like

Counting the cost honestly. If a season of entries consumed six weeks of senior time, that is a real number and it should be said out loud alongside the metal, rather than treated as though the wins were free.

And separating the two questions a review conflates. Whether someone did excellent work is one question. Whether they were given a brief on which excellence was possible is a different one, and an agency that never asks the second will keep mistaking its own allocation decisions for individual talent.