News Analysis: Award count measures creative

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Bill Britt

May 24, 2004

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1 minute

News Analysis: Award count measures creative

A league table based on agency performance at DM contests helps gauge creativity. A new tool for helping to gauge the creative output of direct marketing agencies may be emerging. During an agency review, it seems as if each agency pitching has a display case in its reception bulging with advertising trophies and plaques. The trouble is, there are so many advertising contests, it is difficult to differentiate contests that attract a large number of high-quality entries from contests that are shoe-ins.

Patrick Collister, founder of consultancy Creative Matters, has created a league table of contests based on how individual direct marketing campaigns perform in the most important international and national direct marketing awards contests.

The resulting Won Report is patterned after the Gunn Report, which launched five years ago for above-the-line work. The annual rankings created by Donald Gunn, a former creative director at Leo Burnett, is used by clients to draw up shortlists and is even used by a few agencies as a the basis of bonus systems to award creative staff.

The Won Report awards points to direct marketing campaigns based on their performance at contests such as Cannes Lions, ECHOs, D&AD and One Show, along with at least one local campaign from each major country.

The three most awarded agencies within the UK are TBWA/GGT, Harrison Troughton Wunderman and Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel.

Fred Koblinger, creative champion at Proximity Worldwide, the network that ranked first among agency groups in the inaugural 2003 report, says it is great news for the DM industry that the Won Report has been established because of its objective ranking of creative award-winning work.

The top winning DM campaign was Nike's 'The Scout', created by CP Comunicacion, Barcelona. The highest ranking UK campaign was DePaul Trust's 'Choices" campaign, created by Publicis, London. The other UK campaign to rank among the top 10 was Prudential Assurance's 'The Plan from the Pru', by TBWA/GGT, London.

Collister is a former executive creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, London, and most recently was executive creative director at the EHS Brann group of direct marketing agencies, before founding creativity training company Creative Matters last year.

WORLD'S BEST PERFORMING AGENCY GROUPS 2003

Rank Agency Points

1 Proximity Worldwide 384

2 Ogilvy One 268

3 M&C Saatchi 124

4 TBWA 97

5 MRM Partners 96

6 Wunderman 78

7 Saatchi & Saatchi 72

8 Rapp Collins 68

9 Draft Worldwide 65

10 Publicis Dialog 60