Advertising awards

I got a chance to judge the UK Young Lions advertising awards and Adforum’s PHNX awards. The Young Lions responded to a common brief with the solution viewed through their specialism:

• A communications activation plan.
• A creative concept.

The standard of thinking was high, but I could also see the benefit of more agencies and brand teams tasking younger members of staff to enter the campaign. I was expected to having to wade through dozens and dozens of entries; there wasn’t that many.

Adforum’s PHNX advertising awards attracted global entries and took a long time to go through the entries that I saw. I got to see a lot of good work and wanted to showcase some examples later in this post.

PHNX were more complex in nature compared to the UK Young Lions, with many more categories.

Advertising awards mistakes.

I saw a few unforced errors:

• Category-spamming — award entries were submitted for categories that they weren’t appropriate for. You would see the same work turning up category-after-category with no relevance. You could see other judges becoming frustrated in the electronic chat function that ran alongside the entries.
• Link the work tightly to the challenge that the client faces. You would be surprised how many entries failed to do this.
• Have your entry in a language that the judges are likely to understand. You can only get so…