It is March. Or June. Or October — it doesn’t matter, because there is always an awards season and it is always now. Somewhere in an agency, a creative director has just pinned a brief to the wall that reads: “Cannes / D&AD / The Drum / [insert trophy brand here] — entries due in six weeks.” The room has gone slightly quiet. Not because people are excited. Because everyone is doing the same calculation: six weeks, current workload, probability of winning, and the ratio of effort to outcome that has historically characterized this exercise.
The calculation never adds up. They enter anyway.
The Mythology of the Award
Awards exist in the creative industry for reasons that are simultaneously completely understandable and almost entirely disconnected from the stated purpose. The stated purpose is to celebrate excellence, recognize craft, and set a standard for the industry. These are real things. They happen.
The actual function is rather more complex.
Awards serve as a currency — a proof of quality that travels independently of the work itself. A “Cannes Lion-winning agency” is a label that opens doors, justifies rate cards, and appears in credentials decks alongside the kind of client logos that agencies put on credentials decks. The trophy is not the point. The point is the press release, the LinkedIn post, the four words that go beneath the agency name on the pitch.
Which would be fine, and even honest, if the process of getting there were acknowledged for what it is. It rarely is.
The Submission Process, Annotated
A standard awards entry for a medium-sized campaign looks something like this:
First, someone has to decide to enter. This decision is usually made by senior leadership on the basis of a feeling — a conviction that the work “deserves” recognition that is only loosely connected to any objective assessment of the category, the competition, or the likelihood of success. The decision is announced. Nobody objects. The process begins.
Then someone has to write the entry. Awards entries are a specific literary genre — part case study, part love letter, part sales document — that require their author to describe the work, its strategic context, its execution, and its results in a voice that is simultaneously humble and triumphant. This is harder than it sounds. It is also, almost always, done by someone who was not responsible for writing the work itself and who must now reverse-engineer a narrative of intentionality from a project that was, in reality, a series of compromises, late nights, and pivots.
The results section deserves special attention. Awards increasingly require quantifiable impact — reach, engagement, sales lift, whatever the category demands. If the work was designed to be measurable, this is straightforward. If it was designed to be beautiful, it is not. This is how you end up with entries that report “7 million impressions across all channels” as if that means something, and “brand sentiment improved by 14%” without explaining what it improved from, to, or why 14% matters.
Then someone has to compile the materials. The case study video. The screenshots. The supporting evidence. The credits — God, the credits. Awards entry credits are their own political document, a negotiation between who actually did the work, who the client wants acknowledged, and who the account director has promised will be included. People have resigned over credits. Relationships have ended. The work itself is sometimes secondary to who gets listed in what order.
The Economics Nobody Talks About
A serious awards entry, done properly, takes between twenty and sixty hours of skilled labor. Entry fees range from a few hundred to several thousand euros depending on the show. If you enter five categories at a major show, you’ve spent somewhere between €5,000 and €15,000 in fees alone, before counting the time.
Almost none of this is billed to the client. In most agencies, awards submissions are treated as overhead — a cost of doing business, like the coffee machine and the Spotify subscription. They are absorbed into margin and never discussed in terms of return on investment, which is philosophically interesting for an industry that spends a great deal of time talking about return on investment.
The agencies that win most consistently are, unsurprisingly, the ones that have made awards a systematic practice rather than an annual panic. They have dedicated people. They track deadlines. They photograph work as it happens, knowing they’ll need it for submissions. They write case studies while the project is fresh rather than six months later when the data is murky and the team has half dispersed.
This is not a secret. Every agency knows this is how you win awards. Most agencies do not do this. The gap between knowing and doing is where the forty hours live.
The Trophy Arrives
Let’s say you win. The trophy arrives at the office in a box, wrapped in tissue paper, accompanied by a certificate that is slightly too large to frame without looking like you’re compensating for something. There is a brief celebration — drinks, a team photo, a LinkedIn post that performs well for 48 hours.
Then it goes on a shelf.
In most creative agencies, there is a shelf. Sometimes it’s a dedicated wall. The trophies accumulate over years — some proudly displayed, most gathering a fine layer of creative industry dust, their relevance diminishing slightly each year as the industry moves on and the campaigns they celebrate recede into the archive. Junior creatives point at them occasionally. Nobody else looks.
The real value has already been extracted. The credentials deck has been updated. The press release has been sent. The award has done its job. The trophy is a receipt.
If the economics of awards, pitches, and unpaid creative labor sound familiar, the piece on the unpaid agency pitch covers similar territory. And for the broader question of how creative work gets valued — or doesn’t — the one on charging what you’re worth has been making rounds for a reason.
What Awards Are Actually For
Here is the honest answer, which nobody in an awards show prospectus will give you.
Awards are for careers, not companies. They are for the creative director who wants to move to a bigger agency. For the copywriter who wants to go freelance with something impressive to show. For the strategist who is building a reputation in a market where reputation travels by association. Awards are a personal asset that gets built on company time and company budget, which is why agencies that are smart about this treat them accordingly — as a retention and recruitment tool, not just a business development one.
This is not cynical. It’s just accurate. The award genuinely recognizes good work. The trophy genuinely signals quality. The career benefits are real. The business development value is real. None of this is a con. It’s just that the framing — “this is about celebrating excellence” — omits the industrial logic underneath, which is that excellence in this industry is largely valued for what it signals, not what it produces.
Knowing this doesn’t make you want to skip the submission. But it does make it easier to have honest conversations about how many you enter, why, and whether the forty hours are going to the right shows for the right reasons.
The Year You Skip It
Every few years, an agency decides not to enter the major shows. This decision is usually framed as a values statement — “we’d rather spend that money on the team” or “we don’t need external validation” — and it always generates a brief moment of industry attention before being quietly reversed the following year.
The lesson is not that skipping is wrong. It’s that awards are structurally embedded in how the industry operates, and opting out is harder than it sounds when your competitors are still playing and clients still ask about your trophy shelf during pitches.
The more sustainable response is to be strategic about it. Enter less, enter better. Focus on shows that matter to your specific clients and market. Write the entries properly, which means allocating actual time and treating it as creative work rather than administrative burden. And accept that the forty hours are not wasted — they’re just going somewhere different than a trophy.
If you’re a creative professional who wants to build something that outlasts any awards cycle, the NoBriefs Club shop has merchandise for people who’ve decided the best trophy is work that actually changes something. Worth looking at between submission deadlines.
