Industry Awards: Earned, Bought, or Invented? with Jonathan Harrop

"You're on the receiving end of a coordinated PR campaign." - Jonathan

80% CSAT wins trophies. That's a problem.

What does it actually take to win an industry award worth winning? Jonathan Harrop has been on both sides: he's judged at the Drum Awards and spent years at AdColony running a $6 million global marketing budget that produced over 200 wins across Ad Age, MMA, Smarties, Adweek, and the Drum. He knows how winning entries are built, what judges are really looking for, and where the whole system falls apart.

This episode is not a takedown of awards culture, nor is it a defense of it. It is a sharp, honest account of how the game actually works, from AI-written entries getting zeroed out in jury rooms to government budget claims that defy how policy actually moves. Jonathan also pulls back the curtain on Forbes 30 Under 30, pay-to-play structures, reader polls as legitimacy theater, and the one signal that probably tells you more about a vendor than any trophy ever will.

Timestamps

02:05 — The Networking Case for Showing Up: Even if you only make the shortlist, attending the ceremony is worth it; the room is full of peers you'd otherwise never meet.

03:05 — Reverse-Engineering What Judges Want: The submitter seat teaches more than the judge seat because winning at scale forces you to systematically decode what passes the first filter before an entry ever reaches a judge.

04:32 — AI Entries Getting Zeroed Out: Judges are now zeroing out entries that read as AI-generated because reused winning phrases signal zero effort, and effort is exactly what judges are supposed to be rewarding.

14:38 — Operationalizing an Awards Campaign: Jonathan breaks down the full process of building a winning submission, from early result tracking to video case studies and cost management, and what it actually takes to scale a program to 200-plus wins on a limited budget. The unglamorous version.

22:45 — Company Awards Are Sales Tools: Best-places-to-work and technology innovation awards are fundamentally sales assets, a sticker for a deck that a salesperson shows a buyer, not signals of genuine excellence the way campaign awards are.

28:45 — DM9 vs. Havas: Which Is Worse? DM9 fabricated evidence and was caught; Havas Costa Rica's "Lessons of Shame" claimed a $73M budget shift and the reshaping of four presidential platforms. None of which could be verified. The award still stands. The case that wasn't caught may be the more dangerous precedent.

38:22 — Rating Manipulation Is Everywhere: App stores, review platforms, and survey flows are routinely engineered to funnel satisfied users toward public ratings and dissatisfied users toward private feedback, making most star-rating signals structurally gamed.

48:35 — Perception Is Reality in Awards: Winning awards cements your credibility as a leader in ways that are hard to replicate. The system's flaws don't cancel that out.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jacqueline Freedman

Founder of Monarch + Making Sense of Martech

Guest

Jonathan Harrop

What is Making Sense of Martech?

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

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 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,

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

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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. They'll say, are you enjoying this app? And if you say

no, it opens an email form or redirects you to their website and you can give them feedback. And

if you say yes, that's when they ask for you to go to the App Store and rate that rating. So buy. And

that's setting aside like the fact that like there's so many paid ratings on the App Store,

like tell me more than funny. Just look at them like just find a five star or four and a half

star app. Look, the reviews and so many of them will just be written by clearly by AI or great

app thumbs up. Like just trash. That reminds me, everyone go subscribe and also give a five star

rating to this podcast. And guess what? There are no incentives, but. recognition and appreciation.

Podcast. YouTube. Everything is focused on that feedback. But how are you garnering it? I think

it's very different if you're asking it at the end of a YouTube video or the end of a podcast,

versus deliberately sending people who have a negative opinion one way and people have a

positive opinion. Yeah. And there's definitely tools and flows that a number of companies have

put into place where you as a developer don't have to think about it and they do it for you. For

folks who maybe have zero awards budget and no agencies submitting on their behalf.

Is there a category of genuinely excellent marketing awards and award systems that are.

We are know that folks should consider and make time and budget for.

I think the strategy side is one that is not necessarily talked about a lot. Speaking of like

the drum umbrella campaign, there are what I would almost call like wonky categories. Like

really, really like in detail. Like search honestly, is is a big one. AI strategy is a big one. That's

pretty new. And those are so new and and search is not. But they're so detailed in like

you must tell me exactly the data. Like those judges are harsh on exactly where these things

were. They know the space. Because if you're a search marketer, you know it like no one is like

winging search. And those judges like they know it because it is so data driven. And AI SEO is

also very similar, but for different, like everybody who's in it and confident enough to

make those judges is so far on the bleeding edge that they also know those things. And I think they

appreciate, you know, new opportunities and new perspectives on those campaigns. So I think

focusing on strategy, focusing on really like technical pieces can really, really create wins

for people because there's just less entries in it. There's less competition. So being able to

focus on something where you're not competing with a Coca-Cola, it's really is helpful. Very fair.

And then just being very specific, like every award show has really, really defined categories.

Usually it's not entertainment gaming like a lot of the time it is very, very specific of like down

to the country that this campaign ran in. If you're running things internationally or locally,

like get as specific as you can, figure out what worked, what didn't. You can always ask editors if

you don't win, like, hey, what could we have done better? And most of them are happy to talk to you.

I would say, you know, if you have no budget, you need some money just to pay the entry fee. You

know, the entry fees are a reality. We've talked about expensive entry fees. What would you say is

actually an average budget to be prepared for a singular submission? If you can only afford one,

you're probably paying somewhere between 200 and $500. That would I would, I would say is a broad

average. You should definitely be budgeting to enter 4 or 5. And most shows, if you enter multiple

categories, will give you a discount on subsequent entries. So that helps. That's good to know. That's

a good tip and trick. Have a couple of thousand dollars set aside. It's not earth shattering.

Depending on the size of the company you're at, it might be. But you know, if you're successful enough

to think about doing an award, then you're probably you've probably got a little bit of

money somewhere. I would say you can look around out there and there are people who specialize in

writing award entries. If you're not super confident in it, there's people who specialize in

the video side of it. But that said, there's nothing stopping someone from looking at what

worked in the past and doing it themselves like award entries are not. I mean, really good ones are

After Effects, but it can be as simple as if you can run cap cut, you can probably make a pretty

decent award entry in iMovie on a mac, and probably do okay and get your point across.

Scriptwriting is a little more challenging, but honestly, if I were doing it today, I would use AI

for my script 100% in addition to sort of like just the general like, does this sound right? Is

this effective? Sort of like back and forth that I might do to the audience that I write. When I was

happy with it, I would 1,000% throw it in AI and say, turn these points into a two minute video

script. Speaking of AI, we've talked about how in a lot of ways it's making everyone's submission

similar, but if it is also collapsing roles that are involved with any singular

campaign or product, how can judges calibrate the scale of a

campaign and the effort these days? Like, does a five person team's result mean something

different than it did five years ago versus 150% team, I think? Yes. So one of the award entries that

I judged this year was they very, very it was in the PR category, and they very specifically called

out the entire thing was done by two people on their internal party. That was impressive. That

spoke to me as someone who's been very small teams before is really good when you don't talk

about your team size. That makes me think it was probably part of a large team, but I think if I

were to get an entry that said, like last year, we did this with 20 creatives and now we did it with

ten. I would say I shouldn't have said that, but I think there's definitely an expectation that

things cover more bases. I think as a campaign, and I think the idea that more

people or less people can do more is hard to judge on an individual basis, because every

campaign is different. I think when you're a small team, you should be calling out when you've done a

really good job with efficiencies and tools, using AI to identify opportunities, or using AI to

create a ton of different creative examples that we could test against. That's a really good use

case of hey, we used to have, we would have needed 20 junior production designer to to do all these

tests. Now I needed two senior designers. I think that's something worth calling out, as

you know. And it may backfire on some awards like some some judges may say no zero. But ultimately,

like I think for better or worse, like that's the direction the industry is going. And transparency

is always smart. Being able to say, hey, we used all the tools available to us, and we did not

deliberately ignore something that would have made our campaign more successful is a good, good

call. As a judge, it is hard to kind of call that out and say, is this good or bad? It's going to

depend on the entry. If I got an entry that was like, we generated five videos in C

dance for this campaign, I would give it a zero because ultimately, like there's a very necessary

human component to marketing and advertising that some people try and squeeze out. And I think the

best results that involve AI use it as an enhancement or a production shortcut might be not

the best word, but force multiplier would be the way to way to put it. And I think if you're going

all in and just saying, hey, we'd use zero creatives. And the strategists typed this into

ChatGPT, wrote a script and then threw it into C dance like you're missing the point. Yeah. I mean,

you can make mistakes without the the help of AI as well. You know, to use another beverage brand,

Pepsi did the Kendall Jenner one a few years ago and that that was not a good one go well for them.

But, you know, Pepsi is still around, still distributing drinks and chips and all kinds of

stuff. Some places can afford to make mistakes. Some places cannot. Without a doubt. And while I

probably am one of the oddballs that is willing to dig into awards, especially as I'm

evaluating vendors really trying to understand the landscape, what is something you would

recommend folks do to trust and verify whether it's a creative award, a

CSat award. You name it. And we've also of course talked about G2. Forrester. Gartner. Like what is

maybe like a first principle you would recommend for folks who decipher what's real and what's not.

My test was always who else is one? The wider the ranges of winner and their like,

winning multiple times is great and some people deserve to win multiple times. But the more

different campaigns companies, agencies, providers, vendors, whatever the category is, the wider the

range of winners over the years, the more honest the judges are probably are in aggregate. Because

even if you're good and you're consistent, judges get bored for sure. I mean, otherwise Nike would

win every year because they pretty much always have outstanding work. Yeah, but their own bar is

super high, so you end up judging people against their own histories. I think that is probably the

number one thing that I would say is diversity is probably the biggest indicator of quality more

than anything else. But there's, you know, there's always going to be repeats, like, you know, just

from a budgetary perspective, Coke is always going to have more stuff. Disney is going to have more

stuff that they can submit. Yeah. And Fox and Disney used to be very big partners of ours for

award entries that add quality. For a long time they were always, always game for some submissions.

Okay, Jonathan, this is the exact conversation I think everyone needs to understand within these

industries that are creative, but also sometimes substantive. And while it was never a defensive

awards, it was also not a takedown. It's a very complicated history, but a much sharper way of

telling which trophies actually mean something. And I appreciate you being honest about both

sides of the table, because I think that's an experience and perspective that so few have had

access to. I haven't had access to it. I have only seen it from being a really nosy investigator.

And so before I let you go, who is someone we should have on the podcast. So I had a great time

at the Drum Awards this year with Wendy Magnuson, who's the head of brand and media at zoom, and she

had some really awesome perspectives. I would love that introduction. Okay, well, thank you so much,

Jonathan, for coming. Where can folks find you all along? Here your musings. I am at LinkedIn at

Harrop. Jay is my LinkedIn username if you want to do the direct URL. I'm one of the few Jonathan

Harris out there, mostly on threads at Jonathan's posts. And then that is also my Instagram. Is there

anything we didn't discuss that you want to raise that you think is relevant? I think the number one

thing that I've learned about awards is that perception is reality, and they go a long way

to cementing what you're doing as a leader if you're winning an award.