The Awards Industrial Complex: Earned, Bought, or Invented | Jonathan Harrop

00:00:01 — 00:14:37

My guest today has sat on both sides of the velvet rope. He's judged work at the Drum Awards and told the room to reward ambition, even when the work didn't fully land. He's also, in a previous life, run a marketing budget specifically to win over 200 industry awards. So here's where I want to start. Which version of the awards game is the real one?

The one that he judged or the one he played? Or is the honest answer that they're both real and that's almost the problem. So a little bit about our guests. First, Jonathan Harrop is the VP of marketing communications at Citi, where he is brand and comms process discipline inside one of the world's most compliance heavy environments.

Before that, at AD Colony and Digital Turbine, he ran a 6 million global marketing budget that won over 200 industry awards. AD age MMA, Smarties, The Drum and Adweek, including two prestigious Reader's Choice Awards and systemized the process of winning them. Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. I would like for you to defend awards and how it benefits entire marketing teams, and as a result, the marketing, operations and technology teams to scale more from a like a a personal perspective. I think I mentioned this elsewhere. It's great for the creatives to just get that external validation.

Number one, that's awesome. If you're the marketing leader, if you're not the person, like putting the campaign together, if you're a CMO or an SVP or an EVP, you're probably going to have a conversation at some point about a budget reduction, especially in 2026, having an award in your tool belt and saying, hey, we won these awards, we got industry recognition for this team, got industry recognition for the work that they did.

That is a very powerful argument in your favor to at least keep things stagnant or not. Second, probably at least keep your team, keep people's headcount because you're saying we can do great work with the people that we have. It may not be the best argument to getting new headcount, but I don't think that's the market that we're in either.

If you submit for an award and you're shortlisted, the tables cost money. The tickets cost money to the award ceremony. That's how they do it. Also, it costs money to rent a venue. Like there's a very practical cost that the the outlet has to do but go to the award ceremony. It's a great networking opportunity.

You get to talk to people that you might know, might not know, meet new people, and at the very least, it's a pretty half decent dinner and free drinks. I am so excited to dive in, but let's start off with some rapid fire. First, I ran the whole thing. So exactly what was your first martech tool? Hootsuite. This was back when I was at GameStop and I was running the.

We would now call Community Marketing or Community Management for their digital venture to try and compete with steam and what is now the Epic Games Store. And so I ran their Twitter, their RIP Facebook, all the forums. You know, at AD Colony we used Sprout Social, which I really liked from terms of like a real grown up martech tool.

I learned pardot from scratch, from the ground up. Okay, submitter or judge, which seat has taught you more? Probably the submitter side. When I took over marketing and AD Colony, and when I took over the award side, which was very, very focused, especially around the APAC region, because it's very important.

Awards are super important to the brand sales side in APAC. I came into a very ad hoc process, but one that they were doing very frequently. So they had a lot of a lot of wins. So part of the process was like breaking down like, okay, what did we submit when we won this? What did we submit when we won this? And sort of figuring out like, what are people looking for?

What are the judges looking for? What what passes that first filter test. Because obviously they they get more submissions than they end up going to the judges. That process has changed pretty dramatically over the past couple of years. So I think doing the submission side and winning so many, you know, globally, company level, campaign level with partners on our own, just with partners sign up and them saying go forth.

I think that made me a little more equipped. When I did move client side, when I moved to city and the drum came in and said, like, hey, you know, we know you from all these submissions and wins and sponsorships and now you can come judge. And I think the judging side taught me something different, which was what everybody else was saying, because we didn't necessarily get to see all the entries.

You got to see the video, but you didn't get to see the written part. So you got to sort of like really delve into the detail what people put in. So it kind of gave me a perspective of like, I know why they submitted it this way. I know why there is one this year that submitted in both the PR category that I judged and also the social purpose category.

I thought it was a great entry, but it did not really fit in the social purpose category that well. They were much stronger for the PR side even. And it was just like this little tangential, like, yes, there was a charity component to this, but that wasn't the main thrust. And my understanding of that from doing the entry side is their client was probably like, you need to put this in five categories.

And they're like, which five categories do we put it in? Because I've been I've been in that seat and you're like, oh, I guess there's a strategy like out-of-home component to this, even though it was a mobile campaign. Like you make the client happy if you're if you're working with them on an award submission.

So I would say, yeah, I definitely learned the most on the submission side, but that doesn't mean the judging side was just walk in and know everything. Yeah, well on that, now that you've seen both sides, what is the most overused phrase on submissions? Good award entries require a lot more human touch.

Seeing an AI sort of like spit out the same phrases that have won stuff in the past was kind of like, you're not really trying here. Like there's no effort going into this, and that's really what I should be awarding. And there were people in the judging room who literally just went like, this reads like AI zeros across the board.

Oh, wow. That's both harsh, but also kind of fair at the same time. Yeah, yeah, there were some very hard ones now in like the search category, I was not as harsh on AI because some of those entries were literally like AoE stuff, like really sort of like pushing and like, hey, how do we how do we leverage this brand, this effectively brand new channel separately from search.

And then a couple of the really good ones were like, how do we move our search strategy and success into. Yeah. So it was less harsh on those. Yeah. But I would say setting aside that, I mean, the number one overused phrase was in the PR category and also the social one was just talking about views at the top level or eyeballs or this was seen by X number of people and just absolutely astronomical numbers.

Major sunglasses brand celebrated a pretty large anniversary last year. So they were part of the entries for this year. And there they said they were seen by 7 billion people. And I that's like, no, you got 7 billion views, sir. Uh. Aw man. Yeah. Like, basically saying that each of you is an individual. Seems like, you know, a leap that a lot of entries want to take is like each impression is an individual view.

It's like know people see things multiple times. I do wonder if there's sort of a gap at some places when they're doing an entry in terms of like what some of these metrics mean. So a lot of them. But I was like someone in the process of approving this should have been like, did everyone on the planet see our ad once and only once?

Because that doesn't make sense either. You know, Coke is probably the only company that I can think of that probably can say everyone on the planet sees our ad. You've worked in gaming, adtech, mobile and now in banking. Which industry has the most honest relationship with its own numbers and metrics?

Definitely finance. Finances. There is a very strong regulatory compulsion and requirement to be honest about your numbers, and it's all audited all the time. Like constantly, Consistently. Your own employees in finance are incentivized by various regulatory bodies to report wrongdoing. So most firms have a very strong internal reporting structure because they want to report internally and fix things and manage the disclosure, because all that stuff has to be disclosed.

If you if you make a mistake or report it something out, but manage that disclosure instead of, you know, someone who may not necessarily be the best at phrasing things for the company's benefit. So definitely anything that a bank puts out is going to be very, very double checked and triple check. There's a few people that bang the fraud drum constantly around adtech and vanity metrics.

Um, Doctor Augustine Fu is all over LinkedIn. Every time any adtech company publishes a number and he's like, this is why I don't believe you. If you run any types of campaigns in in advertising at all, period, I would strongly encourage checking out Doctor Fu's work and what he does. You know, and it's interesting that a few people who were previously really big builders in adtech who are now out are kind of saying like, do we really need to talk about it this way?

Do we really need to say these numbers this way? And I think AI has also sort of exposed a lot of the middlemen in the programmatic ecosystem and like what value they were really bringing. For sure. You know, if you're running, it's a lot easier to run an analysis on a 10 million line spreadsheet with Claude than it is to have, you know, some poor, underpaid data scientist to it.

And that can give you at least people start asking questions. Last but not least, what is your hottest take from a marketing ops perspective? MKL or a vanity metric. But MKL are essentially like how low did we lower the bar? Yeah, see, that's where I get frustrated. I love MKL because you hire the bar and you ensure there is a steep barrier to entry, so they're actually substantive and actually qualified.

An MKL is good. Having standards is good, but I think having an MKL as a KPI for your marketing team is not. I prefer the marketing qualified lead to pipeline ratio and instead that is the barometer, but I digress. It's a dilution most of the time, and I struggle with clients who don't think about that that way.

If you have to tag a specific metric to it, you can say my campaigns drove X. I want to set the stage and make the case for the real thing with regards to awards. So let's start with the version of awards most people never see, and it's the one where winning is actually really hard. So when you judge the Drum Awards the past couple of years, what actually separated the entries that won from those who didn't?

The number one thing was actually carrying through and showing me the results of what you put out there, and how those results translated to sales donations. If you stopped at impressions, I was not interested, and I think that's probably true for most judges I've heard the defense. It's like, oh, it's a branding campaign.

It's impressions matter, eyeballs matter. It's like, yeah, but if you're not including at least some correlative number of like, hey, during this campaign period increased, you're looking for actual results and impact, and it is sometimes harder to and like I don't necessarily need I'm not necessarily looking for direct attribution, but I need to see some impact beyond we paid to show this ad to x number of people, especially in like smaller markets.

There was a Canadian casual eating what's apparently a bar. I did not know that. I thought it was a casual eatery that did a campaign about basically any hockey team they wanted to, like, really embrace and manifest. The win was their whole whole entry piece, and it was an interesting campaign. It did really great, but in the end, like it didn't, they're like, oh, it drove footfall during game time.

I'm like, did it? Or was it just the fact there was a game time? Yeah. Would it have changed your perspective if they shared the standard average benchmark? I think a little bit, but there's so many confounding factors when you're talking about a tie in like that. Like were the Canadian hockey teams having a good season?

I don't know, I don't follow hockey, but like they didn't include that greater context of, you know, hey, even though the teams were doing worse than they historically have, we still had more people show up. That would have told me more about this. This campaign was successful. There's a limit. So, for example, The drum has a fairly generous text entry piece.

So you do the video and then you do the text entry for strategy and impact. If you're doing something like can, can is pretty short, can is depending on the category, 2 to 3 minutes for the video. There's the board like can has the famous like board which has to carry like all of your big pieces. Their written entry portions are, I want to say like 150 to 200 words each.

Like, it's not a lot of space to make your argument. So you have to be very judicious about what you put in. And I think, you know, for can I know the video does a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of those videos get reused. Like I could tell in the drum when I was getting a recycled canned campaign versus someone who had written something specifically for the drum, and we would do the same thing in AD Colony, like we would write a good entry, and then we would put it for we would target one specific show, and then we would say, okay, what other shows do we have?

What questions are similar across them? How can we pull them together and, you know, submit and really like reduce the amount of work we have to do to get the most number of awards per campaign for a Mops or martech practitioner who's never worked at an agency, an awards feel like someone else's game entirely.

Is that perception accurate, or is there a version of this that's relevant? Is it something one can pick up? One of the biggest benefits to awards, period, is that they tell the team, you did a great job. If you win an award, if you get a bronze, or especially if you've never won anything before, like it feels good to get an award.

But there is definitely a perception that they are a creatives game that they're awarding. Like the most wonderful creative that still drove results, but there's so many an award shows that have tons of different categories, some of them which are very like operational data driven. The strongest ones that I saw in the search category this year had a very strong ops and data analytics side of things.

Telling me how the team acted on insights is really important, you know, and how the campaign setup worked. And there is a place for an operational component to every award, obviously, like if you're going for, you know, the big creative awards, it's going to be a smaller part because this campaign succeeded, because of these things that we did on the operations side, because you can make that argument.

And I think as a judge who looks for the metrics in these results, I think an operational person can make a really strong case. And there's now enough like best practices and stuff like that out there like you can. Right. And that is, I think, where people don't want to award something that they could have done better, I think is the the ultimate piece.

And there are definitely there's definitely campaigns where I looked at it and I was like, I've done better than this. Like

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you judge. Honestly, you did it on its own merits. But it's. It's hard not to. And that's why you invite people. If you're an awards runner. Like, it's why you invite people who know what they're doing because they can say, you know, this is missing X and Y, you have one. At one company, more than 200 awards with a general budget of 100 K a year, including salaries, what does it take to actually operationalize and build a campaign that will survive?

Not just serious judging, but also the unglamorous work behind these trophies? The biggest thing that it takes is to understand what you're going to submit ahead of time, because you have to be able to pull those results. And, you know, AD Colony was on the vendor side, so we didn't necessarily have access to all of the results that an agency would want to put forward or that the brain wants to put forward in terms of sales or footfalls or things like that, things that we need.

So if you identify very early on in the process, like, hey, this campaign looks really good, the creative is great, or the strategy is really unique. You can bring that up to your partners in the process and say, hey, we think this is great. If the results pan out. Please share these things with us so that we can write a campaign around it.

People are more apt to agree to that process. If you don't share costs, which we would, we generally took on the cost of those submissions. The first step is writing the case study. Most award shows focus problem statement. What is the strategy to overcome that? How was the creative devise and then what were the results?

Some variation of sort of those four pillars. Sometimes they'll group them and sometimes they'll split them out. And then most of them will also not require. But it's generally advised to do a video case study. So after you've written the case study you have to then take that and turn that into a two minute script.

And then that's kind of a thing where a lot of the cost comes in. Whether you're using an internal resource, you have to pay their salary or you have to pay that department from your budget somewhere, whether you use an external contractor. Oftentimes it's a blend depending on how many things you're entering.

But that's really where the cost can add up with revisions and things like that, especially because you're having to get the copy and then send that over to the agency. And the agency says, change this, this and this. So that's I think the revisions are where the the run up cost is. And that's why when we identified these campaigns initially we went, okay, this one's going to be a good fit for this category in this show, this category and this show, this category and this show.

And so while the individual entry fees aren't necessarily huge, like I think the most we ever paid was like $5,000 for an entry fee. And that was a big show. They add up over time, especially in I'll keep bringing up AIPAC, but Amia was very similar. Um, there's so many shows and there's so many categories in each one, and you want to maximize your chances that up over time.

There was one show that we ran our normal playbook. We entered. We won. Nothing like we got shortlisted, but we didn't win anything. The way we're laying out entries, which is successful for nine out of ten other shows that we do. So are we going to bother with the show again? No. Probably not. Um, so I think, you know, making that instead of investing the time and money for one show, like focus on the like focus on the on the ones that you're winning with, the strategy that wins instead of like, you know, turning your reels, trying to get ten out of ten out of ten is pretty good.

All right. I want to talk about the most infamous example in my experience within martech of pay to play. And so before I do so I want to ask you what CSat score, which is customer satisfaction score? Do you consider award worthy would be like 80%, 90%, 95% plus? What would you consider to be I don't know. So the interesting thing about CSat is I did a GameStop.

We did monitor that. And then in my time at Apple, we were very focused on like Net Promoter Score. The people who give you positive feedback are a minority. It's much more easier for people to yell negative things, especially on the internet, to do surveys. People are just much more apt to do that when they're upset.

What's the truly outstanding customer satisfaction score? I think anything above a nine is pretty great. However, if you're submitting for awards, you need to be going past that, right? So like you need to be turning people from. Yeah, that was pretty good too. That was so good. I want to tell my friends.

Yeah, I feel compelled. Yeah. Apple culture promoters, evangelists like that is what you want. And those are those people who are giving that 96, 97, 98 or 10 out of ten. The bar isn't hell these days. Uh,

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but the reason why I ask that is kind of the setup on LinkedIn. There was a post, and this is not sponsored by any stretch. While High Touch is a long term sponsor of making sense of martech, this is unrelated. The head of Customer Success, Ju, posted that they have a 99.2% CSat score. Yes. Pretty good. Kind of insane.

I don't think I've ever seen one that high. So I want to share a story. Time I discovered through a lot of research and digging at one point in my career, braise this one I can verifiably back up because I did the research myself prior. So they won the North Face Scoreboard award, and they've won that for seven years running.

Mhm. And this award is run by the Customer Relationship Management Institute which is great. It requires though a minimum annual membership fee a five grand. That's just the minimum to even be able to participate. Also this institution sells customer experience training, customer surveys and benchmarking that the award criteria are built on.

So I looked into the criteria. The criteria is a four out of five customer score. So that's an 80% across support, account management and professional services, which sounds really rigorous until you realize it's only 80%. And we were just talking about the bar is way too low skills are not great. No they're not.

And so they're both the vendor selling you the tools to qualify and the body deciding whether you have what it takes. So is that pay to play. Yes. I will defend Bres slightly here because they're participating. Because they can. And they probably they do have those numbers right. Great. Like there's a business development relationship happening there.

If they're really winning earning those numbers then that's that's good. Most awards that I've participated in sort of flipped the other way where there's the award entry fee, because all of these are run by like even can is run by Informa. These are separate companies. It does. It is not cheap to put these on.

Yes, there's a ticket sale component. But to most of these award shows they then want to. Typically what will happen if you submit and then you get shortlisted. You'll get the the BD email from, you know, AD Age or whoever and say, hey, there's this award ceremony dinner. Don't you want to sponsor a table?

You're on the shortlist. Having now been on the other side, I know that that does not impact anything. So, you know, to an extent like, is that pay to play? Yes. But I don't know that that's necessarily raises problem or fault for sure. It's a structural and there's probably there's other. I think J.D. power is probably a good example of that.

And like the auto industry or not just auto but like all over the place, right? GT power does a bunch of stuff. Well, what I found really interesting is I double check has been a few years since I learned of this, and it's been just lodged in the back of my brain. There's no other martech vendors on this list.

It's a very interesting of unknown names. And so I guess I struggle with the legitimacy of the inseparable nature of a vendor and the relationship with the award. Right, creator? Yeah. I mean, there's there's always a lot of with any company wide award, right? Like where it's not a campaign that you're submitting.

It's your best places to work. It's your which I've won a few of. It's your, you know, innovation Award or awards for specific technology that your company has developed, those types of awards when you submit them. Those are very much like sales tools is what you're gunning for. You're gunning for a sticker on a deck that a salesperson is going to show to a buyer.

Exactly. It's looking for the stamp of legitimacy. Yeah. And so I think there are a lot of like like you said, like unknown companies that you've never heard of that gun for a lot of these awards from otherwise legit organizations that they've heard of. And I think that's part of it is, and I think a lot of those smaller companies are probably the reason that a lot of these awards, like just keep going and keep churning through because they're profitable for, you know, the organization running them.

And then some of it is, is literally just like I might say, like PR for CRM. I, for example, is like they're like, hey, we have a great relationship for the tools that you're buying from us. You're doing so well with us. Let's keep this relationship going. Some of it is just like backpacking, not having entered that award.

Like it's it's tough for me to question the results per se, but it's definitely like internally there's probably someone at brace going like, really dudes? Or we really like shouting this from the rooftops again. I know at Forbes, I know a few people who write for Forbes. They will say, no, it's not, it's not paid.

It's not like people don't pay us. They submit. But like we make the decision. It's like, yeah, but you're on the receiving end of a coordinated PR campaign that someone has put up where this person does bylines, this person does interviews and like, you know of them because they're being pushed at you as a judge.

And I question some of those Forbes folks as to whether or not they're aware that they're the recipients of a PR campaign. Yeah, it's not as cut and dry as like the Forbes editors going like, yes, this person's been very influential this year and they're under 30. Give them the it's not that brought to you by our sponsors.

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00:24:48 — 00:48:31

And now back to the hot seat. And so we are upon the season. Where can 2026 just wrapped. And I want to look back actually to last year. So the company damn nine won the Creative Data Grand Prix for efficient way to pay then scandal. The case film used AI manipulated footage and adopted Ted talk to simulate results that never actually happened.

Then two more campaigns were pulled. So as a judge yourself, when you're scoring on the results, how do you actually know or confirm that the numbers in front of you are real? Because they, as an example, just fabricated evidence outright, and that is just egregious. Yeah. You know, the DM nine situation is interesting because having been on the production side when doing a video, most examples of a phone or computer in any filmography is done in post.

When I first saw the investigation going, then they were like, no, this is totally like, this never happened. That's very that's very different. That said, like, I don't want to blame the judges too much either, because like, even for the drum, I judged 40 different entries, which is pretty low. Can some of the categories have hundreds of entries and all of the judges?

That's not it's not their full time job like it's you got to do that on top of your work. I can't necessarily take the time to go out and fact check every entry. One of the interesting things is with AI, can does a first check to make sure all your boxes are your boxes are checked. But there something does probably need to happen because the ease and the ability to make stuff up as well as like the number of people who are using AI to write their entries like hallucinations are very real.

Stuff's going to creep in, and there needs to be probably a stronger check on the data that you're inputting, and you need to provide proper proof. Third party metrics are a very big part of any any marketing campaign. I think that is probably where you need to double down and make sure, hey, is this a number on a board that I'm looking at, or is this a document that I can pull up and see the actual results?

For sure, that's hard. But then also some of the questions are like, is this an estimate at the top of the the show I talked about views and impressions being individuals instead of just views. I know instinctively as as someone who works in the industry, not everyone on the planet saw this. How are you? Framing your results is a really other important part of that, and I think that is probably more a more common way to frame stuff.

And there's probably is some number fudging going on. And not every vendor measures things the same. And it's very easy for some folks to say, hey, you saw this ad, but it actually loaded below the fold and no one actually saw it, but it counted as an impression, which we definitely did 100%. We picked and chose which metrics look good, and we did not talk about the metrics that did not look good, because why of course.

Yeah. Okay. So then in a similar vein to that scandal, Havas is Costa Rica Lessons of Shame campaign won a Gold Lion at the same festival for a campaign claiming that a student protest produced 73 million increase in education budget and reshaped four presidential platforms. That's pretty impressive to tout, and campaign magazine couldn't verify a single one of those outcomes, and the agency also declined to respond.

But the award still stands. So a cand.jur. called it a dangerous gap between the fictionalized narrative of the case and the actual real world impact. Is this a worse problem than the DM nine? Because at least DM nine got caught, so I judge the social impact one this year. The drum and donations are a very, very challenging thing to track because even if you do a great campaign, some some of those donations might have come from one way or the other.

One major celebrity donation could really like skew the numbers and averages versus year to year. It seems like this was related to like government policy, but I can tell you from the few people that I know in like Dallas, politics like numbers for budgets don't change overnight, and they certainly don't change because of one ad campaign.

I don't think it's necessarily irresponsible for Havas to have gone in and said, hey, we were part of this push and we were part of a movement that generated $73 million in education budget and changed presidential policy. I think that's a very fair way to frame it. I think they did what I would expect a good award entry to do, which is to claim ownership.

I think that judge who provided that quote is probably being a little harsh, overinflated, but I think that's very different from something that is a governmental budget piece, because it just doesn't move that fast, for sure. And so these examples are just easy. One martech and couple within the well-known advertising industry.

So it's not isolated. And a recent AD Age investigation based on conversations with 22 industry executives described inflated claims, vote trading and even job offers in exchange for votes as recurring problems and specifically, can case studies. Have you seen any version of that in a jury room, even if it's a soft version of politics, reputation based voting, or just because a Polish case film was oversold?

No. But no one's offering a job that I have seen. One of the reasons I actually did not do a lot at Cannes at AD Colony was the people generally at Cannes are not decision makers. The people that attend, they are people who delegate. That said, the drum is very, very harsh on, hey, if you have a conflict of interest, you will leave the room you will not talk about.

And they do a very good job on the front end of like if you have an award that's being judged, you will not have that category. You will not even be in the same space as that category. So you generally don't have and there's enough people to where I don't think you have. It would take a lot of work to go front and say, hey, vote for.

That's not to say that people don't engage in some soft politics of like, hey, you know, I'm in this category, but I've never seen anything that hard would have shocked me if that were true. No. But do I think it's probably as overblown as some of those claims are. Maybe there's smoke, there's fire. But is it a small fire or is it a forest fire?

Yes. AD colony. You won ad weeks. Best mobile network. And that came through a 10,000 vote reader poll, not a jury scoring KPIs. That's a very different, legitimate kind of voting system. Does this win belong in the same category as the ones who are judged on planning execution? Or is it a fundamentally different award currency, and does it belong at the same atmosphere?

It might be closer to sort of like the industry awards, like the CMA Award that you talked about. The best mobile app network was interesting because we, their editors sort of nominated us on the front end, and no doubt that was because they knew who we were because we sponsored Adweek events, we entered awards like they knew who we were reputational.

We actually won twice. We won in 2018 and we won in 2020. Yes, that is correct. So not seven years running, not seven years running? No. And we we came second. The second year there is a huge PR component to it because once you're announced as a reader, you need to get all of your employees to register and vote.

You need to spin up the socials. You need to spell like you need to be out there saying, hey, we had it attached to the bottom of all of our emails. It's not a free award. It requires earned and owned media. Yes. For sure. We really drove drove it home and really, really went for people to to vote for us. Did we buy some of those votes?

No. Like it was, I don't think I can't talk to what the salespeople said, but I don't think it would have, uh, moved the needle too much on the individual basis. But like that middle year that we did not win. I want to say it was in mobile. They turned it into like a point of, like, national pride for their home country, and they went hard for it.

It's hard to compete with when a company turns it into like, if you're proud of your country, you will vote for their bad your their company. Well, in the irony, if it's a mobile award and they're mobilizing a country. Yeah, yeah. As soon as they took that tack, I was like, all right. We ran a good game this year.

I think the editors probably looked and went, this is more votes than we have readers, maybe. And so we won the next year. Pretty impressive. Yeah. Okay. We've been talking through the pros, the con, the really sticky middle. If the system really is a genuine mix of rigor theater, the only useful question left, in my opinion, is how do you tell which is which?

I think the most valuable one is the one you can win. Ultimately, the main big benefit that you get out of a campaign is telling your creative team and your ops team and your, you know, strategy team, you did a great job. Like this. Is your recognition, the external validation? Yeah, it's it's important.

It is a big, big. And it helps those people if they're award motivated, it helps them stay at the company that they're at because they're doing award winning work. If they get laid off or if they, you know, decide to pursue greener pastures, it's a great resume builder for them. A benefit of like, there are people need to be, you know, cautious about awards that are very clearly pay to play.

And it's very obvious when you look it's honestly like there are those small awards that no one has heard of, like Cannes has not paid to play. Adweek is not pay to play. The drama is not paid to play. It is in the sense that, like there's an award entry fee, but it's not give us this money and we will give you a win.

A lot of the best Places to work awards out there, whether the local or national. A lot of those are, hey, if you have so many job listings with us, you're probably going to win this. Interesting. Good to know if it's the best advice I could give is like, if it feels kind of slimy, it probably is. It's not hard to tell the signal from the noise.

It's not. And they're not really industry back padding in the way that a lot of entertainment awards are people like Oscar bait is called Oscar bait for a reason, and that's why it's such a big deal when an award that's not that style of movie wins. And so I think there is a lot of signal to it. And I think it's valuable to a lot of teams.

Do I think it necessarily moves the needle in the sales room when you say, hey, our team won five awards, you should go with us. I think your RFP probably hinges on a lot more than that. Yeah, it might be good for a cold email, though. I don't believe in cold emails, but it definitely for does not instill confidence for me on the martech side in terms of the awards one can get also depending on the situation, but I feel like these things are too hard to track and as a result, too hard to trust because of the inner workings.

If you're just purely talking about like, what are your numbers for this? I think you then invite the question of like, how are you framing these questions? How are you? Yes. Who are you sending these to? G2. Let me send you a $25 gift card. Yeah. I mean, I have never participated in sending or receiving to actually do, but I know many who have.

And I understand it is just how the game works, but I'm hopeful to disrupt it soon. There's also a very much a like everybody knows that G2, for example, is I wouldn't say pay to play, but incentivized. So to a certain extent, if everybody knows that like, hey, you got this number because you sent some people some Amazon gift cards.

People don't take it seriously. So are you really spending money in the right place to do that? If you're still doing fundraising as a startup, some of those awards can be a little more valuable to as signals to VCs, and they tend to care a little bit less about the incentive side because you're you're not comparing.

They don't care where that someone's incentivized. They just care that you have the award. So I was going to say like App Store reviews are a really big example. Most apps nowadays will. They can only ask you if you're satisfied. Three times like an app. It's an absolute limit. And that pop up is actually controlled at the system level, which is why most of them now won't just say rate the app.