For much of that quarter century I was the hack who produced the "book of the night", writing most of the text, organising the photo shoot and ensuring that the sometimes confusing pictures tied up with the right case studies.
Looking back, loads of obscure trivia come to mind. There was the time the Grand Prix went to the ground-breaking Next Directory, on the very day top executive George Davies, the brains behind the project, abruptly left. Or the award of the Grand Prix to, I think, Friends of the Earth, for a mailshot that came complete with instructions on how it should be recycled on the compost heap. The choice was controversial at the time, but as a gardener I approved.
Who's been the most successful copywriter over the period? Probably no-one knows the answer to that. But there was a period in the 90s where the winner would have been a client, Arthur Bell of Scottish Gourmet and Scotland Direct, who wrote his own brilliant copy.
Then there's the game of DM family trees. In the early years, competition for the most awards was fierce between Ogilvy & Mather Direct (now OgilvyOne) and its breakaway, WWAV (now WWAV Rapp Collins). Later, the torch passed to smaller agencies, and particularly Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel another Ogilvy breakaway.
In the first few years of the millennium, the main battle has been between Craik Jones and Harrison Troughton Wunderman. Guess what? Both Steve Harrison and Martin Troughton served time at Ogilvy.
But last month, it was more or less a four-way split between those two agencies: Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw (one shop with no obvious links to Ogilvy) and a resurgent OgilvyOne. No wonder they call Ogilvy the DM university.
Over the years, the awards have evolved to embrace new areas such as TV, radio, the internet and field marketing. Responding to critics, the scheme has been reorganised several times. It now has one of the fairest and most robust judging systems possible, even though they'll never satisfy everyone.
From time to time you'll hear siren cries from the long-haired lobby, saying the awards should be replaced with a competition based purely on creativity. Total rubbish. What makes the awards meaningful to clients, the people who pay the bills, is that they give equal weight to the strategy, the creativity, and the results. Never forget the old dictum: if it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.
- Ken Gofton is a freelance journalist who has covered the marketing industry for more than two decades.