Why ad creativity awards urgently need to switch focus

The advertising industry loves awards, but they’re focused on the wrong ones, according to consultant Peter Field, and the result is a crisis in creative effectiveness.

The advertising ideas that are celebrated with statues and champagne at marketing industry festivals are contributing to a crisis of creativity – and actually have a worse impact on the business bottom line for advertisers than the campaigns that win nothing at all.

Peter Field, of Peter Field Consulting, said the effectiveness of campaigns that win awards for creativity has plummeted in the past decade amid an “orgy of short-termism” that wins plaudits and quick sales, but does nothing to build a brand and instead fuels CFO scepticism about whether creativity really has any value to business.

Field was speaking...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands