When potential clients find out about the awards, they are always positively surprised.
That sentence has been true for years and I only recently noticed how strange it is. In my time at This Page Amsterdam, the agency I co-ran for twelve years (2009-2021), we won some of the most prestigious awards in the industry. A Cannes Lion. A Webby. A D&AD Pencil. Eurobest, Lovies, Awwwards, FWA, the national ones. There was a wall in the office covered in framed certificates and a shelf with the serious hardware.
Notice the word, though. Surprised. People are surprised, which means the awards did not bring them to me. They found me some other way, and the trophies arrived later as a pleasant discovery. That was true then too, when the agency was running. The awards impressed everyone. They decided almost nothing.
I have had a long time to think about what they were actually worth, and the honest answer is more complicated than either of the easy positions.
Some of our most precious ones: the Webby, the D&AD Pencil and the Cannes Lion.
What they did do
The awards were real, and so was some of what they bought.
Talent wanted to work for us. In a market where every agency is fishing in the same small pool of good designers and developers, a shelf with a Pencil on it does quiet work. People want to make the kind of thing that wins those, and they want to be somewhere that has proven it can.
The team believed they were somewhere special, and they were right. Winning at that level tells a group of people that the standard they hold themselves to is not imaginary. It is recognized, externally, by juries who have seen everything. That belief compounds. It shows up in the work on ordinary Tuesdays, long after the ceremony.
Peers respected the shop. Inside the industry, the awards located us precisely. Other agencies knew what we were.
And, the part I did not expect: they are still working, twelve years of running and five years of distance later. When I mention them now, in a different country, in a different business, they still function. The awards outlived the agency. As a durable asset, a Lion turns out to hold its value better than most of what we built.
What they did not do
They did not bring clients. Not in any volume I could ever trace. The clients came from referrals, from relationships, from the work itself travelling. The awards confirmed a choice people had already made, and maybe kept us in a few conversations we were already part of. What I cannot remember is a single engagement that started because someone went looking for an award winner.
They did not protect our margins. This is the part that took me years to say plainly. Through the entire period the trophy shelf was filling up, clients compared us on price. The quality was recognized at the highest level the industry has, and the recognition changed nothing about the conversations where money was decided. Quality, it turns out, is not positioning, and a jury cannot fix that for you.
And they did something worse than nothing, which I have never written down before. The awards attracted a specific kind of brief: clients who wanted to win one too.
That sounds like a compliment, and it arrived as one. A company sees the wall and says, we want that, make us something like that. What they usually did not have was the budget for it. Award-level work takes effort. Effort takes time. Time costs money, and the gap between what that work costs and what those clients wanted to spend was where some of our hardest conversations lived. The awards were, in a very real sense, attracting the wrong briefs: ambition-sized expectations with budget-sized budgets, drawn in by exactly the thing we were proudest of.
So the shelf was doing two jobs at once. It was telling talent the truth about our standard, and it was telling a certain kind of prospect a lie about what that standard costs.
The uncomfortable accounting
Put those two lists next to each other and the awards look like a strange investment. They strengthened everything internal, the team, the standard, the belief, and almost nothing commercial. The wall got fuller while the business stayed stuck at the same ceiling, and I have written elsewhere about what actually held us there. It was never the quality. The quality was arguably the most externally validated thing about us.
What I would tell my younger self is not to skip the awards. I would not skip them. The talent effect alone was probably worth the entries, and the team effect was worth more than that. What I would tell him is to stop expecting them to do commercial work they were never going to do, and to notice earlier what kind of client the shelf was pulling in. Recognition is an internal asset wearing an external costume. It makes your own people stronger. It does not make strangers pay more.
The strangest part of the whole accounting is the one I am living now. The awards are doing more for me today, as a story, than they did then, as a strategy. Then, they hung on a wall while clients negotiated the rate down. Now, they are a sentence in a conversation that makes someone lean in.
I still think about the wall sometimes. All that framed proof that the work was good, in an office where the real question was never whether the work was good.
The work was good. That was the one thing everyone agreed on, including the juries, including the clients pushing the price down, including us. It just was not the thing the business needed proven.
Originally published on LinkedIn.