I was asked to sit on the judging panel for the FMBE Awards this year, the field marketing and brand experience ones, and I said yes partly out of vanity and partly out of curiosity. Reading a stack of other people’s best work, scored against everyone else’s best work, turns out to be one of the more useful things I’ve done for my own thinking in a while.
The first thing that surprised me was how quickly the flashy entries fell away. There’s a certain kind of submission that arrives dressed to impress; big production, big names, a case study written like a film trailer. Some of them were genuinely brilliant. Plenty of them, once you looked past the gloss, couldn’t actually tell you what they’d set out to achieve or whether they’d achieved it. Impressive and effective turn out to be different things, and a scoring sheet is very good at exposing the gap.
The entries that rose to the top nearly all shared the same unglamorous quality. They knew what they were trying to do before they did it. There was a clear objective, stated plainly, and then evidence that the work moved it. Not “the campaign generated huge buzz”, which tells you nothing, but a specific thing they wanted to change and a believable account of changing it.
The same few things kept earning marks without my quite intending them to. The strong entries named a real objective; “raise awareness” is not an objective, it’s a shrug, and they’d have none of it. They owned what hadn’t worked, which read as far more credible than the submissions where everything apparently went to plan, because nothing goes to plan and the judges all knew it. And they held a sense of proportion, so a modest budget with a sharp result tended to beat a huge budget with a fuzzy one.
Most of what separated the winners wasn’t creativity, or budget, or even results in the abstract. It was clarity: the good work knew its own point, and could survive the simplest question you can ask of any piece of marketing, which is what it was for and whether it worked.
I’ve been a harder marker of my own work since. Before I sign anything off I try to picture it on a judge’s pile with nobody there to explain it, and put it to the two questions that sank so many entries: what is this for, and did it work?
