Are we obsessed by awards?

At RKCR/Y&R we recently launched a web utility called the T Minus awards countdown timer: http://www.t-minuscountdown.com/

It’s website and screen saver which lists every single awards competition in the world, alongside their entry dates and the date the work has to have run by to be eligible for entry.

Did we do it because we’re obsessed with awards? Because we’re desperate to find any possible way of winning as many of the things as possible?

Nope.

Awards have always been important to the ad industry.

As a benchmark to judge our work by.

A by-product of doing great work that works.

The cherry on the effective advertising cake.

But then a few years ago a man called Donald Gunn did something that changed everything.

He decided he’d make a list of which agencies were winning the most awards. Globally.

This list became, in effect, the mother of all awards schemes.

Agencies and agency networks became focussed on getting as high up his list as possible, believing it to be a way of proving their worth.

In turn, creative people were tasked with helping their agencies get there.

The pressure for individuals to win awards to get themselves noticed and further their own careers, is now joined, palpably, by the pressure to win for ‘the greater good’.

Having to keep track of all the awards schemes that contribute points to the Gunn Report, their deadlines and their entry dates, adds exponentially to that pressure.

Awards are a fact of life.

And T Minus was consciously created to hopefully make more of that life spent doing award winning work and less worrying about when and where to enter it.