Flightless bird

Cape Town - The Loerie  Awards evenings this year were, well, just like the Loeries. Noisy, too long, but still capable of generating good vibrations. Until the pain of those seats became too unbearable, driving people out of the auditorium in their droves, brows knitted in a search for nicotinic are alcoholic support.

For Loerie novitiates it was exciting and perhaps rewarding, but to old hands the event looked a bit stale and predictable this year.  Maybe it was the cost factor at a time when we still haven’t totally shaken off the effects of the recession.
 
And maybe it was the world’s most uncomfortable seating that made the evening seem to go on interminably. But the non-stop partying was as frenzied as ever, with the all-in-blacks determined to prove they hadn’t lost their social skills.

It wasn’t a vintage year, but the awards seemed to go to the right entries.

A new point system has been created by The Loerie Awards CEO Andrew Human and even he agrees it’s too complex to use without a custom-designed computer programme. The system, he declares – triumphantly, I venture to say - cannot be implemented manually.
 
Having spent the best part of two days trying (and  failing) to draw up a complete ranking table of all winning agencies showing which awards were won and the total points allocated (something which Human is not doing), I have to agree: the new system is incomprehensible and impossible to manage manually.

This gives Human more control over the information flow, but he insists there will still be transparency, as he’s willing to explain any result to anybody who asks. But it’s not quite the same, is it?

Moreover, Human is not going to publish the points, or allow anybody else to do so. Arguing that a points system reinforces the ad industry’s unhealthy obsession with awards, his intention now is to produce tables showing the ranking order of the competing agencies but not the points that earned them that rank. It’s as if the Olympics stopped giving the times, distances  heights or weights achieved by competing athletes. You’d know if you won, but you wouldn’t necessarily know how close it was. And if you came in fourth, you wouldn’t know how much you needed to improve to win a medal next time.

There’s nothing that boosts confidence in a set of results quite so much as looking at the actual numbers on which the results are based. Understandable, easily accessible information is a huge check on errors.

Another advantage Human holds out for this approach is that you don’t need to make decisions about ranking the various competitions. It doesn’t matter whether it’s harder to win a Cannes Lion than a Loerie, because all you’re comparing is the relative ranking of South African against South African.

His rules also result in some anomalies. Grid, the seventh-best performer on the weekend, doesn’t feature in the biggest ranking table (33 agencies) because it’s not a member of the Creative Circle. And Gloo, the outstanding digital agency, doesn’t appear on any agency table because it’s now classed as a production house.  The reason for the switch is that it allows the general agency and the digital agency both to claim full points on Loeries won by a collaboration.

(Extracts first published in Finweek, 14 October.)