It’s awards season. Put in an order for double brandies all round. With a hefty side order of Valium.
At Flow we’re brave. Brave enough to lift the lid on the frenzy of awards season. Be it the New Generations (digital), Loeries (creative advertising) or PRISMs (PR), just three little words – “entries are open” – are guaranteed to turn a normally placid and professional team into a stressed, strung-out, wild-eyed cacophony of people who seem to have taken complete leave of their senses.
Things proceed swimmingly for a day or two until the first meeting to decide which pieces of work to enter for an award, and which to leave out. It’s here where warm, generous smiles give way to brittle, jaw-clenched smirks. It can get ugly. In what becomes a kind of boardroom adaptation of The Hunger Games, contenders are ruthlessly cut down until what’s left is a glorious and triumphant handful of campaigns deemed worthy enough to make the grade.
It gets worse, for once the decision’s made on what to enter, entries must be written, checked, rewritten, checked again, argued over, thrown out, written once more, checked yet again, bickered about, tweaked, edited, submitted to the client for approval, amended, checked, rewritten … and so it goes until literally hours before deadline.
It’s a process fraught with angst and upset. Deep mauve shadows under eyes prove it, and point to sleepless nights, crack-of-dawn starts and diets of all-night Uber-delivered burgers and fries. One starts feeling a bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Yet somehow, it all comes together beautifully (and successfully) in the end.
At Flow we don’t work to win awards; we work to deliver fantastic, effective, within-budget campaigns for our clients. As a matter of fact, we sometimes (just fleetingly) wonder if entering awards is worth all the effort it takes to win them. But the answer is always a roaring “Yes!”
Why? Because entering awards does a lot of things to a team: it tests us, strengthens the glue that holds us together, gets us asking difficult questions of ourselves and each other, and forces us to be honest about our work. It’s about digging deep and coming up with the goods that make us a team of winners. And, win or lose, we like that. It makes us better at what we do.
Flow has won more than 40 marketing, advertising and public relations awards. We’re incredibly proud of these awards. We’re proud of our clients who trusted us to deliver award-winning work. We’re proud as punch that our peers acknowledged the excellence that comes out of Flow. But most of all, we’re proud of each other and that we made it through another awards season without a drop of blood being spilled.
