The Most Coveted Advertising Awards

Advertising awards are a coveted prize for advertising agencies, although not the most important thing. The good thing about advertising awards is that they let your clients know that your ads are useful and persuasive, that they are clever and creative and make clients want to buy your products. Especially for a new, or up and coming advertising agency, advertising awards are almost like a holy grail which make a difficult, struggling business into an easy going highly successful one over night.

Advertising awards are difficult to obtain. There are so darned many clever advertisements is the problem. For a while, advertisements used to be simple, saying things like, for example, “tastes great”, or “the best that money can buy” - simple slogans which had to do little but inspire confidence that what people were getting was the best. But the internet revolution, combined with the growing cynicism of the consumer (which is right in that companies do sometimes promise things that they can't deliver – if they didn't, advertising would be less important) makes ads so much more intricate and difficult, and advertising awards so much nicer if you can wion them. But it is much harder than it used to be.

Take, for example, that popular car ad. The guy is driving his car on a twisty road and pushes a button, and all of the sudden, the road becomes completely flat and straight forward. The implication is, and the commercial seems to say that, the car drives so totally flawlessly, that it makes the most difficult mountain road as easy to drive as a straight highway. Only, they don't need to come out and say it at all any more. The invention of the high quality computer processing graphics that they employ allow them to “show” you the road actually becoming flat at the press of the drivers button. This is much more powerful than a message based on words – it shows the driver actually having the power to warp reality. I mean, come on. Who doesn't want super powers?

What happens when people become even jaded to images like that is a problem that advertisers have increasingly had to face. Certainly, consumerism has not ceased, a good news for those of us involved in business, but it is harder and harder to figure out what consumers will want. In the future, advertising awards might reward people who trade on peoples cynicism, selling products to people who believe that they are “too smart” to fall for advertising.