The Campaign That Won Every Award and Lost Every Customer

The work was, by any industry measure, exceptional.

The creative was original. The execution was flawless. The campaign generated coverage in every publication that matters to the people who give away awards for campaigns, when they are paid for.

At the industry ceremony, the agency collected more trophies than it could carry. The team celebrated. The case study was published. The work became a talking point amongst those present in conversations about what great communication looks like.

The agency client, eighteen months later, was no longer in business.

People began to question what the award was actually for.

The company's collapse was not directly due to the campaign or the award. — The causes of the business's failure were multiple, and the campaign was not among them. But the campaign, for all its creative distinction, had produced no measurable contribution to the commercial performance of the business it was supposed to serve. And strangely enough, the awards organisers did not have this criterion as a measurement factor.

The customers it was designed to reach had not been reached in any way that changed their behaviour. The brand awareness it generated had not converted into the consideration, preference, or purchase that justified the investment.

It was, in every sense that the industry uses to evaluate creative work, an outstanding campaign. In every sense that the client needed it to be, it was a failure.

Awards and results are two very different things

The communications industry has a structural problem that it discusses privately and manages publicly — which is that the criteria by which it recognises excellence are not reliably aligned with the criteria by which clients measure value.

Awards are judged by people who value craft, originality, and the kind of creative ambition that produces work worth discussing at industry events. These are legitimate values — craft matters, originality matters, and the pursuit of creative excellence produces work that is genuinely better than the alternative. But they are not the same values as the ones that determine whether a campaign delivers commercial return.

Marketing and PR campaigns need to produce measurable results.

A campaign that is creatively exceptional and commercially ineffective wins awards. A campaign that is creatively unremarkable and commercially transformative does not. The industry's recognition system consistently rewards the first category more visibly than the second, which creates an incentive, felt at every level of the agency business, to optimise for the work that impresses judges rather than the work that delivers for clients.

Most agencies manage this tension. The best ones resolve it by building the analytical discipline that ensures creative ambition and business performance are pursued simultaneously rather than traded against each other.

The ones that do not resolve it produce campaigns that win every award and lose every customer.

What the client actually needed

In the case of the business that is no longer trading, the post-mortem is instructive.

The campaign was built around a creative insight that was genuine, distinctive, and well-executed. What it was not built around was a precise understanding of the audience's decision-making process — of what specifically was preventing the target customer from choosing this business over its competitors, and the communication that would most directly address that barrier.

The brief had not asked for this precision. And the result was a campaign of considerable creative quality directed at a commercial problem it had never been asked to diagnose or treat.

The audience saw the work. Some of them remembered it. Very few of them changed their behaviour as a result — because the work, for all its craft, had not been designed around the specific insight that would have made it commercially effective. It had been designed around the insight that would make it admired, creatively.

The metrics that really matter

The communications industry's relationship with measurement is, at best, selective.

Reach is measured. Impressions are measured. Engagement rates are measured. Brand awareness is measured because the methodology is established and the numbers are defensible.

What is measured with considerably less discipline — in most agencies, and in most client organisations — is the connection between communication activity and commercial outcome. The specific, honest, causally argued link between what the campaign said, to whom, through which channels, and what changed in the target audience's behaviour as a direct result.

Managing tough metrics

This measurement is harder. It requires precise objective-setting before the campaign launches, which is absent in most briefs. It requires the discipline to define success in commercial terms — customer acquisition, retention, conversion, revenue — rather than in communications terms.

And it requires the honesty to report accurately when the creative that performed best in awareness metrics did not produce the commercial outcomes it was commissioned to deliver.

The campaigns that win every award are not, as a category, the ones built around this discipline. The campaigns that deliver genuine commercial return frequently are — and they are, as a result, considerably less likely to appear in award entries than their commercial performance warrants.

What Great Work Actually Is

This is not an argument against creative excellence. It is an argument for a more honest definition of what excellence means for business.

The best communications work is both creatively distinguished and commercially effective. It earns attention through the quality of its craft and converts that attention into the behavioural change the client needs. It wins the respect of industry peers and the loyalty of the customers it was built to reach. These objectives are not in conflict — they are, in the hands of the right agency with the right brief and the right discipline, entirely compatible.

The work that achieves both is rarer than the award shelves of the industry suggest. It requires a standard of discipline — in audience definition, in objective-setting, in measurement, and in the honest evaluation of what is working — that creative ambition alone does not produce.

The campaign that wins every award and loses every customer is not a creative success that happened to miss commercially. It is a failure of the strategic foundation on which the creative was built. And it is a failure that the trophy does not cover, as the client who is no longer in business could confirm.

The best campaign ever made is the one that changed what the audience did. Not the one that changed what the industry thought.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8 Billion in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.