Another month, another competition to enter. This time it's a design effectiveness award run by the Graphic Design Business Association and it joins dozens of others on the marketing industry calendar where agencies can win an award for just about every aspect of the industry from best bus side to best sponsorship.
It has got to the stage that several agencies have either completely pulled back from entering awards or are becoming ruthlessly selective in the ones they go for.
"It can all get a little self-congratulatory," says Mr Ray Sheerin, managing director of Chemistry. "It might give you a warm feeling for a minute or two but, ultimately, a lot of them don't matter very much."
He's suspicious particularly of awards sponsored by individual media - "radio awards sponsored by radio stations, poster companies with poster awards, that sort of thing, and I'd view something like Kinsale as completely irrelevant to our business."
The International Advertising Festival of Ireland is held in Kinsale every year, awarding trophies to Irish and international broadcast campaigns. Run by the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland, this is its 40th year and its profile has slipped considerably in recent times.
"When it came to deciding whether to enter it or not, I went to a couple of international advertising news websites and couldn't find any mention of it. If it can't merchandise itself better, then I don't really see the point of going to the expense of entering," says Mr Sheerin, showing that agencies increasingly want more from competitions than a trophy.
He does rate some awards and for very concrete reasons. Chemistry won Marketing magazine's Advertising Agency of the Year Award this year and Mr Sheerin views it as the top award in the industry.
"It's judged by your peers, which is important, but also it's reached a level that clients are very much aware of it," he says. "Within a week of winning the award, we got a call from a company in the final pitch stages of looking for an advertising agency and we got the business."
The agency has been added to several new business pitch lists that Mr Sheerin feels might not have included them before the award.
Mr Michael Cullen, publisher of Marketing, is candid about his reasons for organising this and other industry awards.
"From my point of view, it raises the profile of the magazine among the target audience," he says. "There's lot of cynicism out there about awards but when they are judged by peers and the award is perceived as having legs then it has a certain cachet."
His Agency of the Year Award is in its 11th year, while he established the Marketer of the Year Award nine years ago.
Mr Eunan McKinney, chairman of Graphic Design Business Association, hopes this year's entries to his Irish Design Effectiveness Awards will be as strong as last year, when there were 53 entries to the six-year-old competition, which is, he says, a good entry given that entrants need to support their claim with a case study and client-sourced figures showing how the design impacted directly on the business.
"People do need to validate expenditure on design," he says.Judges assess entries 70 per cent on the basis of the case study and 30 per cent on aesthetics.
The Graphic Design Business Association is under the Design Ireland umbrella body, which includes the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design and the Institute of Designers in Ireland. Both these other groups have their own awards.
Acknowledging that there are perhaps too many similar awards for such a small market, Mr McKinney says that in the future the awards may be merged.
bharrison@irish-times.ie
