What is an award actually measuring?
Topic:
Practice
Year:
21 April 2026
tart with the uncomfortable finding. The IPA’s report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness, drawing on Peter Field’s analysis of its Effectiveness Awards databank, concluded that creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than at any point in 24 years of that data, and no more effective than campaigns that won nothing at all. Read that twice. The trophy and the business result have come apart.
That does not make awards worthless. It makes them a measurement of something narrower than we pretend: the taste of a jury, in a room, on a deadline, judging a two-minute case film rather than a year of work. Useful information. Just not the information most of us claim when we put a Lion in a pitch deck.
Then there is the older question of whether the work was ever real. Cannes Lions has contended with scam and ghost ads, work produced primarily to be entered, for most of its history. In 1995 a jury chairman declined to award a Grand Prix at all, arguing nothing submitted met the standard. In 2000 an agency returned two Bronze Lions after its own investigation found the entries were not authorised. In 2002 the festival stripped two Gold Lions from an agency after finding the client had not approved the work and the account had been lost three years earlier. By 2009 the festival had written a scam ads policy that sanctions the individual creatives responsible rather than their agencies, and in 2010 it withdrew a Press Grand Prix. Each of those is a story about a system that had to be corrected after the fact.
The thing behind the trophy
Awards are easy to dismiss and easy to overrate. Used well, they are a proxy, an outside signal that a piece of work cleared a bar set by people with no reason to flatter you. The mistake is treating the trophy as the goal rather than as evidence of the thing you actually wanted, which is work good enough to be recognized by strangers.
What the numbers suggest about scale
Volume is part of the problem. Cannes reported a record 28,828 entries in 2011, and 29,074 entries from 90 countries in 2021, a figure the festival noted was about 6 percent below 2019 despite covering two years of work. Tens of thousands of submissions, each one a fee, each one competing for a few minutes of attention. When entry becomes an annual budget line, the incentive quietly shifts from making work that performs to making work that photographs well in a case study.
A modest proposal for anyone who wins
Post the work in totality. Not the hero frame and the case film, but the full run: every placement, every size, the versions that shipped without the good typography.
Say plainly what was commissioned, what was proactive, and what existed only as an entry.
Name the client contact who approved it, and the dates it was live.
Publish one business number you were accountable for, even an unflattering one.
None of that requires reforming any festival. It only requires that the people holding the trophy be as transparent as they are celebrated. If the work is real, disclosure costs nothing. If disclosure feels expensive, that is the finding.
Signal, not scoreboard
An award measures a moment of peer judgment, nothing more and nothing less. It does not measure whether the work moved the business, whether the client would hire you again, or whether the idea held up a year later. Those are the metrics that actually matter, and they are quieter, slower, and far harder to put on a shelf.
The danger is optimizing for the proxy. Work designed to win awards can drift toward the spectacular and away from the useful, clever where it should be clear, decorated where it should be direct. When a studio starts choosing projects for their trophy potential rather than their problem, the awards keep coming while the work quietly stops mattering to the people who paid for it.
So treat recognition as a byproduct, not a target. Do work that solves the real problem beautifully, and let awards be the occasional confirmation that your standards line up with the field’s. A wall of trophies earned that way means something. A wall earned the other way is just expensive interior decoration.
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