This episode runs 25 min. 18 sec.
Does your firm enter awards competitions? This week David explains why he’s had a change of heart about awards competitions, as he and Josh discuss why they might be a fit for your firm, too.
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Mentioned in This Episode 129: Awards Competitions
- Why David changed his thinking on awards competitions
- Are awards a recruiting and retention tool?
- Are awards a marketing tool?
- Which awards competitions should you enter?
- Go/No Go criteria for evaluating awards competitions
- Differences between regional, national, global, and intergalactic awards
- How to develop entries that win
- Give your award pursuit a job #, or at least track your time
- Teaming on awards to build relationships
- Leveraging finalist and winner status
- What do you do with the plaque, trophy, crystal bowl, or oscar?
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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing Podcast, it’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Hello and welcome to PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours, and I’m joined by my co-host, Josh Miles. So, Josh, I want to give you an award today for being the best cohost on the planet.
Josh Miles: Oh, that’s a thoughtful thank you David.
David Lecours: Actually, the award I’m going to give you is an opportunity to take on a new topic and that topic is awards competition. I also want to mention that we have a new title sponsor they are SMPS. I want to remind our listeners that SMPS is all about business transformed by marketing-
Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.
David Lecours: All right. So, Josh, our topic today is awards competitions. I guess I have to confess that the reason I want to talk about this as I had a bit of a change of heart recently. I used to personally not be such a fan of awards competitions. I didn’t enter a whole lot of them. I thought that they had value more for, I guess, recruiting and retention, not so much as a marketing and business development tool. Since my firm is real small, we don’t do a lot of recruiting. I just didn’t see a lot of value.
David Lecours: But I have entered a couple recently and maybe it helps that I won a couple of awards and that changed my outlook greatly. I guess I’m a sucker for attention and I like to win things. But I have noticed an uptake in inquiries that specifically are related to winning these awards. I’ve had people contact me saying, “Hey, I saw you won this award, love to talk to you about a project that relates to the award that we won.” So, yeah, I want to just chat with you about that. What’s your background or thinking been about awards competitions?
Josh Miles: Man, I can remember in my very early ad agency days entering just would seem like dozens of award entries into the local Addy Awards and then our firm we would get really excited about a couple of them in particular and others were like, “Well, surely there aren’t too many billboards.” So, billboards got a shot too. This ad’s awesome or this commercial’s great and this logo is really cool and surely we’re going to win a ton of awards. That first year we won exactly zero awards. It’s heartbreaking when you go through all that work and all that effort. Just going through it, the mental catalog of all the things you’ve done that year and stuff you’re the most proud of and then you put it out in front of your peers and to have none of it recognized is really rough.
Josh Miles: Like you, I’ve had years where my former agency would put things into Logo Lounge or into other awards competitions and come back really, just have really huge years and then really down years. So, it’s easy to get down on awards when you’re not winning them. But likewise, when you have the good fortune of … Sometimes, it’s really the intersection of who are the judges and what do they like and what was your work that year. Sometimes you just get lucky but you don’t win because you have lousy work, you win because it’s good work and you get selected because the judges that year liked your good work that year. It’s always an interesting topic and I’m excited to talk through all of this today because like you, I’ve been in and out on awards in the past.
David Lecours: I’m imagining our audience is looking at entering projects that they’ve completed in the local maybe, AIA Awards or local ECEC or BIA or maybe some other trade organization. Or they’re also interested in entering marketing campaigns that they’re interested in something like the SMPS Marketing Communication Awards. Like you mentioned in that first year, you were so gung ho, it just didn’t matter. You were going to enter everything you could. But at a certain point, our audience has to decide which ones are worth it or not. So, maybe some of the contributing factors that might help a marketing director decide, is this award competition worth it? They probably have to do a little budget for the year of deciding which competitions they’re going to enter and work through the math of how much money they’re going to spend.
Josh Miles: Yeah, exactly. I’m at my former agency, we would do this early on. That first example I gave you was from the first place that I worked at, but then in my agency, there for a little while, I would choose. I’ll pick the ones we enter. It’s a marketing expense at some level. So, if we win this, it’s very exciting. And then we get to the point where you get big enough. You’re like, you know what, our budget is X for awards for this year. And we know for this competition, maybe we do or don’t want to put all of our eggs into that one competition basket.
Josh Miles: If we’re going to spend $1,000 or $2,000 or $200 this year for this particular awards competition, how do we decide which items go in there? We would literally just make a spreadsheet and have all the employees vote. We went by popular vote because when it comes down to awards, the more likely it is that somebody’s going to agree with that, that they might have a better chance. I think we tended to do better when we tried to do this a little bit more mathematically as opposed to just by the hearts-
David Lecours: Democratically rather than authoritarian.
Josh Miles: Exactly.
David Lecours: -Josh deciding.
Josh Miles: I made sure there were no hanging chads and it was all very well certified. It was a very clean election.
David Lecours: Yeah. It almost sounds like what you’re talking about is that our audience should consider maybe having like a go, no go criteria for an awards competition, and then deciding in macro, which awards throughout the year they’re going to enter. It seems like, of course, some of the things that they should consider in this go, no go, is reach of the awards. Who’s going to see it? It’s the sort of, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, did it really fall? I saw you win this award, so what? That’s great. It’s nice to have the ego boost, but I think that should probably be a criteria of like, are your potential clients going to hear about that?
David Lecours: That was always my challenge with a lot of these awards competitions was that it was usually, as a graphic designer, I might enter something in the AIGA competition. And then, yes, I get that peer recognition, and yeah, it feels good. But all those other graphic designers certainly can’t hire me. So, I guess my recommendation for audiences is that yeah, you might want to do some of those because I think they are really good for recruiting and retention. But I think in terms of marketing, you want to enter competitions where your clients gather in some way so that they could see you and potentially hire you to do that thing that you’re winning the award.
Josh Miles: Yeah. I think it depends on what you fancy yourself best at. If you’re best at making pretty things, then you’re probably going to win more awards by entering competitions that tend to celebrate aesthetics. If you’re a company that maybe it’s not about the aesthetics, maybe it’s more about the results. Entering competitions where they’re more stringent on the before and after or the outcome or what the impact was. Again, maybe that goes into your go, no go formulation.
David Lecours: Right. Okay. So, multiple choice question for you. Let’s say you are trying to sell your boss, the CEO at your engineering firm about entering some awards competitions. Do you want to take the approach that it is a marketing tool, a recruiting tool for new hires, or a retention tool?
Josh Miles: That is a great question. I think it’s all of the above-
David Lecours: D, all of the above.
Josh Miles: Yeah, I’ll take that Bob for 500.
David Lecours: Yeah, it seems like depending on the awards competition and your intent, and again, who’s holding it, it could fall into any one of those boxes. It seems like the retention tool if it’s not clear, winning awards is something that you can share with a potential, obviously, new hire. But I think recognizing people, especially if somebody’s on the project, make sure that their name is included in the awards submission so that they get recognized as having a significant … In fact, probably you want to list all the people that were potentially involved with that project in your firm, so they’re on record as being associated with this award winning project. That seems like a great way to help keep people around.
Josh Miles: Yeah, for sure. It’s a really sticky situation too, when you have projects where you have so many people involved, it’s just so important that you have all the folks listed in that submission to make sure that when they read the names that you didn’t leave out, Josh, who was leading XYZ because that means Josh is really sad when you leave him off the submission
David Lecours: Yeah. It’s like you get to get them all right, or don’t list any because otherwise you’re going to potentially do more damage than pretend getting people to stay, if you’re upsetting people. That’s not a good thing. There’s a lot of different kinds of awards competitions out there. I’m thinking of there’s local ones in your city, there are often regional ones, maybe your state or collection of state, there’s national, there’s probably global and I’m imagining someday there’ll be intergalactic awards where you could to put your work up against the best-
Josh Miles: The best AEC marketing on Mars.
David Lecours: On Mars, yeah, exactly. Once Elon Musk gets there, then yeah, we’ll be competing it. But I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of the pros and cons or differences either that you had or you would imagine would be associated with those different levels of geographic awards.
Josh Miles: I think it comes back to where your firm’s focus is. If I think back to my previous position, our focus was really national. So, the local and regional awards were interesting in terms of, again, like you said, they serve different purposes. So, the local and regional awards were much better for talent attraction, because we weren’t really hiring folks from the coasts, but we were looking for clients from the coast. So, it was great to have exposure in more national type boards. But doing really pretty work that’s winning aesthetic awards locally is really attractive to other potential creatives who might have wanted to come work for us.
David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. You tend to recruit more locally. So, that would be an intent there versus the marketing perspective, maybe bigger national, if not global.
Josh Miles: For sure.
David Lecours: When you do make … Let’s say you go through then go, no go process and it’s a go. Now you’re developing your award entry. It’s not a small undertaking. I would recommend that our audience consider opening up a job number internally, tracking your time. Because when it comes around next year, you’re going to have an opportunity to decide, go or no go again. We tend to look at these things optimistically. Yeah, let’s do it again, and hopefully we’ll win this time. But unless you have some real data in terms of how much time it actually took, and what was the cost of the award entry, I think you’re not making a very informed decision. So it is definitely a process and one that you should track and hopefully continually improve upon.
David Lecours: There’s always a lot of things that need to go into an entry. What’s your experience been about boosting your chances for winning as you’re going through the entry?
Josh Miles: That’s a really good question. I think having your firm really focus on again, what type of awards competition is this and what do we think the judges are really looking for? Is it more important that we make sure that we’re following some of the old school competitions that require for you to submit things mounted on board and printed a certain way and cover sheets and I’s dotted and T’s literally crossed or is it … Many, many competitions today have moved to more of a digital or virtual judging environment.
Josh Miles: In that case, you can really spend time focusing on, in my humble opinion, what actually matters, which is the quality of the submission, and not just the craft of paper and whatnot. So, yeah, I think it’s a great thing too to go back to the team that worked on it. Even if this is an award, not necessarily for marketing. If this is an award in bridge design, and your marketing team is tasked with entering this awards competition, it’s really important for you to go back to the guys that worked on that bridge and understand the backstory and before and after and what the impact was, and what the community thinks of it. Because all of that can really be helpful in your submission.
David Lecours: Typically, it seems like there are very specific questions that are going to be asked. Like, what was the impact of this project? The classic case study or format of what was included, what was your prescription, and then, what was the outcome? Even if that’s not a specific question, I think your suggestion of, hey take the lead and answer that question on your own. Because, while that’s going to be so much more impressive to a jury than just a bridge that looks really great. We’d love for just to look great. But yeah, if you can show how it impacted the community and what they got for their investment and some of the benefits that weren’t expected, and getting quotes from users of that bridge, who used to have to take another way before the bridge was built kind of thing, or they were scared to go across the bridge. All that kind of stuff that makes the project so much more real because now it brings it down to a human scale. Then you get to hear those stories. Regular marketing power of story is always effective. Wherever you can use that, I think that’s really important.
Josh Miles: That reminds me, I think it’s the Andrew Carnegie story about the Mississippi River, and the bridge that is steel built. People were like, I don’t know about steel for a bridge. He literally led a parade with elephants across this steel bridge. You can just imagine how long, I’m still telling that story however long in the future, but those kinds of narratives along with your awards entry, man, that’s the kind of stuff that will get judges attention for sure.
David Lecours: Yeah, for sure. Our suggestion, one of many is really take the time to read the submission qualifications. They’re probably going to be getting a lot of submissions and they’re just looking for reasons to eliminate some quickly. If you don’t follow those instructions very carefully, then your chances of winning are not very high. So, do that and then look for ways to differentiate your submission. That’s sort of a marketing contest. In a way, you’ve got to stand out, you’ve got to have great content. And then it’s got to be told in a really compelling manner. Whether that be the physical board or digital format or layout, all that stuff definitely matter.
Josh Miles: Yeah, I think it’s important too, to think about, you alluded to this a little bit, but understanding what kind of time and effort that your team is putting towards these. It’s not just about the cost of the entry fee, but also the effort and the hours that your team is putting towards this. Something maybe we can talk about in a future episode is thinking in terms of ROI or return on investment or return on the time that you put into this kind of thing.
David Lecours: Love it, we should definitely tackle that one. One of the reasons my attitude changed a little bit about awards is I realized it was an opportunity also to build relationships. In that you don’t have to enter an awards competition by yourself. Usually, there’s no stipulation about who the entry comes from. So, we entered a competition recently with our client. I think it’s a great marketing tool for account specific marketing. If you want to really cement that relationship, this assumes that the project was successful or you wouldn’t be submitting it anyway.
David Lecours: But usually from one client come more projects, and if not, at least referrals and there’s all sorts of other opportunities. So, any experiences you’ve had where you’ve teamed up, and it’s turned out to be a great thing?
Josh Miles: Yeah, we had a couple of clients that we historically entered year after year after year, and it was totally that. We weren’t always best friends with all of our clients, but the ones where the relationship was just so important on both sides, I think that was the thing that just added to it. Was like, oh, yeah, what are we going to enter this year? Even going into the new calendar year, I would say, “We’ve got these four projects, and I bet we can do an award winning thing for this third one.” Especially the holiday cards. We get really jazzed talking about why we’re going to put a little extra effort into each of these projects because the awards were so much fun to enter together and to see if we won. Always better if you actually win every now and then.
David Lecours: That process of working on it together is something that I didn’t expect would be kind of fun. It was a great way to review the project, and it was a great way to review the experience. Last episode, listeners, if you haven’t heard it, go back and listen to Episode 127, I interviewed Ryan Sydam from Client Savvy. He talks all about how important it is to measure the client experience. So, by entering this awards competition with them, it was a great opportunity to get a behind the scenes from them about how the project went and the parts that they thought were really successful, and the parts that I may have thought. And to get that feedback that you may not get in your standard debrief as you’re working together to present this project in its best possible light.
David Lecours: The other thing … Let’s say, hypothetically, you don’t do a joint entry. Let’s say you enter this on say, behalf of a client or it’s a project you work on. But in all cases, there is a client typically related to this project. Let’s say you do get nominated, I’d highly recommend that you bring your client to the award ceremony. Certainly, at minimum, let them know that you entered it, that you’re a finalist. Get them excited and engaged. This awards competition recently, I’m literally sitting there in the audience next to my client and we’re just on the edge of our seats, “What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?” It was just a great experience to go through that together, and then to win together was of course, even better and we got some great pictures, so all that.
David Lecours: Definitely, if you don’t enter the project with your client, engage them on some level and make them part of the process, they’ll, I would imagine, really appreciate it.
Josh Miles: I think especially if you do something to make the evening fun with the client win or lose.
David Lecours: Yes, that’s true.
Josh Miles: There’s something exciting for sure. To sell them on stay with the Ryan client experience thing. To sell them on the experience of the night and not just the, it’s going to be awesome if we won it, and it’s going to be horrible if we lose. Just find ways to keep it interesting before and after the awards are handed out.
David Lecours: Yeah, go to dinner beforehand, or make sure you have some plan to get a drink or debrief after. Yeah, I like that. We’re good.
Josh Miles: Yeah, for sure.
David Lecours: And then, of course, let’s say the awards ceremony happens, there’s a lot of things that can be done after the announcement. Of course, it helps if you win. But I think that even if you’re a finalist, or even if you’ve entered, there are opportunities. So, I just want to encourage our audience to leverage those opportunities for, of course the easy low hanging fruit or social media posts but you can go even deeper and share it with local journalism outlets. There might be an opportunity where it gets picked up and stories get written. But yeah, use this opportunity for all it’s worth is basically what I’m saying here.
Josh Miles: Do you feel like you did anything that especially helped you get the word out winning this past year? I know you said you felt like you’ve had more inbound requests after having been awarded these things. So, did you do anything, or was it more just the awards themselves?
David Lecours: I feel a little hypocritical in the advice I just gave, because I haven’t done as much as I should have. Maybe that’s why I wanted to give that advice because hopefully it’ll inspire me.
Josh Miles: To self.
David Lecours: Yeah. I was waiting a little bit to get some photos of it. I’ve had those for a while now and I just have gotten so busy with project work. Luckily in this case, it was just people, they were at the event or they heard about it, and I need to do a better job of leveraging some of these wins, because I feel like I’m missing an opportunity there.
Josh Miles: Nobody is paying as close attention to your brand as you are.
David Lecours: As you are, yeah.
Josh Miles: Sending it out three months later it’s really not so bad because nobody else even know they happen unless they were actually at the show or had entered the show. So, I think whenever you get it out, even if it’s the next year. Like, oh yeah, taking a look back at this award we won over the summer, that’s totally fine, I think.
David Lecours: Well, I love that you say that because that makes me think that these awards don’t have an expiration date. And that you can use the fact that you’ve won this award forever, really, because you did. Nobody can ever take that away from you.
Josh Miles: I’m now an award winning firm.
David Lecours: Yeah, exactly right. You can use that as a moniker. What about the actual thing? Let’s say it’s a trophy or a plaque. There’s been all sorts of fun stuff. I play in a lot of pickle ball tournaments, and occasionally I’m happy. I have to say that the metals that are the best ones are the ones that are also bottle openers. Because they actually have a function, and some other function. I did win one recently that was a … What do you call those things? They’re the spinners that all the kids who are into about … Fidget spinners, yes, but it was bronze. Sounds like a cheap plastic one, this was like a bronze one. There was a gold, a silver and … That was kind of unique. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.
David Lecours: But anyway, that’s my question to you, Josh. What do you do with the actual award? Yeah, I’ll just leave it at that. I’ll leave it open ended.
Josh Miles: There is an agency, actually still is an agency here in Indianapolis who are notorious for winning awards and then just mistreating them. At some point, they were taking these plaques and drilling holes in them and then they would just put them on this rod. They had rods in their entry way that just had stacks and stacks of awards, because they won so many of them. I’ve seen other places that maybe are less fortunate to have won quite so many, and they do little display areas within their entry way or if you’re in a smaller office, maybe you don’t really have space for that. Literally, it’s tough to figure out what to do with it.
Josh Miles: Another friend of mine has always done a great job of cataloging all the things he’s won and where he’s been published. If you go to a page on his website, it’s just general for recognition. But it’s articles that mentioned him, and books that he’s featured in, and awards he’s won. Even if the plaque or the piece of paper or the plastic trophy is not something you want to keep and use something for it, it’s still a great thing to list out all this stuff. What have you seen?
David Lecours: Yeah, I think there’s so many different things that reminded me of … I did a tour of a pretty well-known ad agency years ago. At the end of the tour, and they had this lineup of trash cans. They brought us over and they said, this is what we think about awards. We sure like winning them, but it’s not the most important thing. We really want to move the needle for our clients. It was a throwaway line.
David Lecours: But his whole point was, we don’t value awards that much, but we do want to point out that those trash cans, they’re full. They’re full of awards, they’re overflowing. I thought it was an interesting thing. But yeah, I think you got to leverage everything about this. You’re going to invest, you’re going to go in. You might as well go all in, take pictures of the awards, take pictures of you with the award. If you don’t post the analog 3D actual award, at least have a picture of it that you can utilize on your site or in your social media, or archive that somewhere you might be able to pull it out, and put it in a proposal. Certainly, that would be an interesting approach. So, do something with those awards. Don’t just throw it away or let it go.
Josh Miles: A trophy the whole team drinks from. Awards that serve dual purpose, I suppose.
David Lecours: Multi-purposes.
Josh Miles: Easier to celebrate.
David Lecours: For sure. So, let’s celebrate the end of this episode, Josh. We’re about a half an hour in. Our audience is getting to their destination, if they’re driving. Encourage our audience to go to psm.show and check out our other episodes. If you have any comments or questions or anything that you want to get back to us on, the best way to do that is to go to our website. We just updated it. Love your feedback on that. Its got some fancy new graphics, and it’s got our new title sponsor on their, SMPS. The website addresses is psm.show, and then just scroll down and there’s a contact form there, and just drop us a line.
David Lecours: That’s it for this episode of PSM Show. From myself, David Lecours, and Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.
Josh Miles: If it’s not too late, David, I’d love to give us an award for being just under 30 minutes this episode. See you guys next time.
David Lecours: Award accepted.