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Why ad awards are good

Johannesburg - Argentinian adman Pablo del Campo is one of the world's top creatives. He's also Loerie Awards advertising chairperson this year, a welcome choice who will inject an intriguing combination of Latin flair and emerging-nation realism into the proceedings.

CEO of a leading Buenos Aires agency - Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi - he is a multiple award-winner with trenchant views on the value of creative awards.

"They are good for different reasons," he told Fin24.com in an email interview. "They guarantee that the idea is good and attractive for different audiences. They help attract and retain the best talent in the agencies.

"They help build the careers of brand executives. They help build the reputation of an agency worldwide. And they train advertising executives to think in a more simple and convincing way.

"An agency that works on a project and then receives an award for it is more interesting than one that wins nothing, for sure. And this has nothing to do with the award itself, but with the effectiveness of the idea."

He cites TBWA's Trillion Dollar Campaign as a South African example of using intelligence to solve problems with innovative ideas. "There are several strong agencies with very interesting people in South Africa," he says.

Del Campo has noticed a growing trend to base creative awards on strategic thinking as well as creative implementation.

"The traditional festivals are starting to look more like the Effie Awards, where the strategic solution to a problem is taken into consideration. This makes the impact of the idea as important as its efficacy. In the future this will be the way to differentiate good communication from bad."

But for an agency to stand out, an occasional awards victory is irrelevant.

Consistency is key

"The key factor is to be consistent. It's useless to win at Cannes just once, because this may be just a matter of luck. An agency that wins at Cannes and at home year after year is an agency that generates good ideas and that can project international business as well.

"There's no better example than Andes Teletransporter. The idea, developed for a province of Argentina, became a local and international success, winning a Cannes Grand Prix this year. And this is because globalisation produces insights that are  universal, like tastes."

Del Campo believes the renewed importance of strategy will discourage "scam" ads (produced purely to win awards, often with an irrelevant or unsuitable concept).
 
"Scam ads are something that will always be there," he says, "especially in print, since it's very easy to create a print ad and place it in any magazine.

"Fortunately, the other categories have moved to a more strategic place, where you can see the problem of the brand and the strategic solution to it. And there's not much space for scam ads there."

Does he see any parallels between Argentina and South Africa? It doesn't seem so.

"We're South America and you're South Africa. I think that the fact of being from the South makes us work harder in order to match up with the ones from the North."

 - Fin24.com

*The Loerie Awards take place in Cape Town on October 1-3. Judging is August 17-25.
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