Good Creative and the ADDY Awards.

Judging the ADDY Awards.

Recently, I had the unique honor of being a judge for the ADDY Awards of Silicon Valley. For those who don’t know, the ADDY Awards are one of the largest advertising competitions honoring creativity in all forms of advertising from media of all types. The ADDYs start at a local or regional level - like here in Phoenix – and regional winners move on to compete in nationals. Creative professionals from a market outside its own are asked to judge the work entered - this is how I ended up in San Jose along with a judge from Austin, TX and another from Portland, OR.

As a creative who has entered (and won, thank you) several ADDY Awards it was exciting to be on the other side of the critique for a change. But being on the other side made me think of that age-old question – what makes a good ad, website, package design, logo?

We judges were told to rank the entries on a scale from 1-100. That’s it. No specific criteria.  Part of me thought, “shouldn’t we have some set of rules on how we are judging each item?” But then I thought, “Maybe the good work will rise to the top, no matter what the criteria.”

Good creative is creative.

Through the day the answer of what is “good” seemed to be creative that has the whole package. Whatever our own list of criteria was, if a piece of creative was perceived as “good” to us it would get high marks and in turn, an award. In my opinion, whether it’s an ad, website, TV spot or whatever, a “good” creative piece needs to have a few key things.

1.       The creative needs to tell a story. Also known as a concept or a big idea. Without it, it’s just words or pictures on a page. Or screen.

2.       Interesting, relevant copy. Copy that makes the audience say “I can relate to this and I’m interested in learning more.”

3.      Smart, original design and art direction. Every brand needs a visual personality. If it doesn’t look good, even the best message can fall flat.

4.      Content presented in a way that makes sense. This could be considered the skeleton to the conceptual body - a concept can’t stand up without it. In telling a story, if the messaging is too cumbersome, online navigation is confusing or the design creates an awkward flow of information that story will go nowhere.

5.      X-Factor. Some creative just has “it.” You don’t know why you like it, you don’t know why it works, it just does.

Advertising, like anything creative, is subjective. And in the real world the consumer is the judge. So while getting awards is great, maybe the real award for a “good” piece of creative is when it creates real results.

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