The Loerie Awards (this year called just “The Loeries”) open for entries this week. The entry deadline, whilst not yet publicised, will be fairly generous so there is still time to get something ready to take some metal on the night.

The big agencies already know a lot of tips and tricks to win. But here is a simple (and perhaps simplistic) view on how you can tilt the odds in your favour.

The first question a lot of people ask is: why bother? Isn’t it all just self-indulgent wankery?

I must confess I held this view for many years before I was in a creative agency, and before I saw how clients and industry players use awards and award ranking tables in the selection of vendors and partners. There can be no doubt that an agency like Gloo or Ogilvy Interactive in Cape Town has successfully marshalled their victories at the Loeries and other awards to claim a pre-eminent place in the minds of potential clients – and staff.

Everyone wants to be a winner. Failing that, everyone wants to hang out with a winner.

Whilst no one award or award show can categorically confer upon an agency the mark of greatness, a pattern of success certainly does. That said, even one significant trophy can raise the profile of a smaller agency and open the floodgates to exciting, creative briefs.

So with that said, how do you get one?

1. Good Work

Whilst this goes without saying it also bears a little unpacking. Great work is not, and cannot, simply be well executed work. The Digital Loeries these days are judged by people with at least as much conceptual creative and branding skills as design and technology. They are looking for big, fresh and innovative ideas – and only then for exceptional execution.

There is no magic formula for good work. But it is something that is relatively easy to spot in a crowd. It makes people sit up and take notice. It is surprising. And it is sufficiently unlike anything that’s come before it.

Invest your time and effort in one or two good, or even great, pieces a year. That’s really all you need.

 

2. Sell the Work

Typically a Loeries judge will see a few hundred pieces of the work in the course of their judging activities. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that the amount of attention paid to each entry during the filtering rounds is going to be short. So you need to grab their attention and sell your work.

Typically these days a well constructed entry video is considered essential. Look at some examples from Cannes to see how the best in the world are doing it. Often the video is as amazing as the work itself.

You can’t dress up garbage with a great entry. But you can mask genius by a bad one.

 

3. Know thy enemy

The Loeries is a competition. In the end you will be judged against others and in order to know where you rank relative to them you need to know what they are doing. We are all terrible at looking outside of our own businesses to see what the competition is up to. We get demoralised by it, or we arrogantly ignore it. But you cannot beat an enemy you do not know.

Sites like 10and5 (which Uno de Waal kindly operates), MarkLives, The Media Online, Bizcommunity and others carry news of the best work happening in digital. Also being one of the 0.4% to click on banners frequently exposes you directly to current campaigns for major brands.

Spending time knowing what will be in competition will help you to choose your potential award-winners wisely.

 

4. Follow Trends

By this I don’t mean be cliched, but judges are well versed in major local and international trends. They know what’s big and what’s up – and they’re looking for echoes of that in the work. The one great thing about being in the developing world is that we tend to follow international trends. So be well versed in what’s winning overseas and try to reference that in your work and your entry.

A simple example is “responsive design” – a trend from last year. From a craft point of view highly responsive sites would have been recognised by judges as being clued into where the world is going and, from a  craft perspective anyway, would have been marked up.

 

5. Industry Participation

This may seem like a controversial point but the more you give to the industry, the more it’ll give you back. Being selected as a judge is a key part of what agencies do to help their own success. And not in a devious way, but once you understand the judging, the landscape, other agencies’ work and the personalities doing the judging it is much easier to plan to win.

Judge selection is a black art and is has a lot to do with the industry profile of the people selected. Those who are out there, doing great things for digital marketing, are more likely to get chosen. It’s just that simple. There are lots of ways to do this – both via the DMMA and in your private capacity. One thing’s for sure though: if all you’re doing is making work and never stepping out the likelihood of being noticed and of gaining influence is small.

 

** I am the Managing Director of NATIVE, one of the country’s largest digital agencies. I have judged the Loeries 4 times and am currently the Committee Chair of the DMMA which appoints judges for the 2013 Loeries **

 

A couple of years ago my friend Justin who works over at Quirk said “Culture is everything” in business. At the time I had just done a big merger and I was used to running a relatively small, and relatively uncomplicated business and frankly the word “culture” sounded like something we didn’t have or didn’t need.

Several years on I’ve realised he was largely correct – and I have come to appreciate and understand the full power of culture in an organisation, and a few things about how to approach it.

For starters, what is it?

Culture is, put simply, what it is like to be in an organisation. It’s the thing that is left over when you remove all the actual operations of the business.

By analogy it is the equivalent of what it’s like to eat a particular kind of food. And its how it leaves you feeling and the imprint it leaves on your senses once you have.

Typically in a small business – and even in a larger business – culture is an emergent property of the company. By that I mean: no-one stops and says “Ok, this is going to be our culture”. It is an expression of the personalities of the founders, the office space, the city and the collection of characters the business employs.

For this reason small businesses put little or no conscious effort into culture building. And like a human body sometimes the culture is healthy and sometimes its unhealthy but it moves organically.

As the business grows and matures the need to take a firmer hand with company culture grows with it. The reasons are manifold:

• The founder or founders leave, get married, get old, get rich – and are no longer as present in the business to push the culture with the force of their own personalities
• Similarly the team gets older – which means they are not as persuaded by free beer and snacks. They want to get their work done and go home to their kids so they’re just not around to bond with colleagues.
• Things that were novel become tired. The first ten times you took the whole team out for pizza everyone loved it. Now they just expect it – and complain about the choice of restaurant.
• Bad elements creep in. With each hire the chance of hiring someone who does damage to culture grows – and if you culture is simply organic this damage can poison the business fast
• The business gets bigger. This is the simplest and most dangerous occurrence in any successful enterprise. Suddenly the business becomes a “faceless corporate”. The dreaded “processes” and “systems” appear. And people begin to feel like cogs in a machine rather than engaged and valued.

So what can be done to manage culture?

This is not a definitive list but here are 5 learnings from recent years:

1. Decide what kind of culture you want. And be realistic. It should be an expression of the leaders of the business because they have to stamp it into the organisation by example. If your CEO is a tyrant trying to build a supportive, collaborate culture will never work.
2. Entrench culture with visible practises and artefacts. If you want to be cautious, reward and highlight prudence. If you want to be zany and creative make sure your workspace and the tone of your communication echoes that.
3. Recruit to fit your culture. That means you need to have someone who understands the culture thoroughly involved in all recruiting, and you need to turn away people with great skills if they don’t embody and extend the culture you want.
4. Design processes and systems that feel like you want your business to feel. If someone spends all day jumping through admin hoops they are unlikely to experience the company as agile and creative. Likewise if everything is wild and chaotic expecting a culture of fiscal discipline is delusional.
5. Teach culture by teaching your way of doing things. Most businesses miss the simple power of teaching programs and training. Nothing embeds a way of doing things more than the right kind of learning experience. We have found simulations and roleplaying to be vivid demonstrations of the kind of business we are, and what it’s supposed to be like to be a member of our team. This includes a strong induction program.

The starting point of all this is to simply ask the first question above: what do we want it to be like to in our business? Everyone will find their own way to bring life to that but there is no doubt that the world’s leading businesses have all taken the time, and invested money, in consciously creating culture.

 

I often get asked: “But do you love your job?”

This is unsurprising as I must often look and seem stressed, exhausted and stretched. For my birthday this year my staff selected “Angry Birds” as the theme because, so they imagine, I am often lightly seething.

In fact this isn’t so – although I do have a hard edge these days. Required, I think, in the kind of work I do. Confidence is just arrogance dressed up in a bow, so I prefer determination. To be and stay determined does not require, and may be hindered by, felicitousness. And so I understand why people misunderstand this aspect of me.

My ex-wife used to find it difficult to understand how I could “love” being in advertising, running an advertising agency. She laughed when I described a piece of work as “beautiful”. To her – and to many people – advertising is the purest form of hollow labour. Toiling away to help evil corporations sell products to people who don’t need them, and can’t afford them.

Apart from providing some insight into the “ex” part of the preceding paragraph, this is a point of view that I share to a surprising extent. I work hard to exclude advertising from my life. I never watch TV or listen to the radio; I install banner blockers and don’t buy the newspaper. If I could install some kind of film on my car windscreen that could detect and blur billboards I would.

What the hell, then, am I doing in this industry?

You see I think what we do in digital advertising – or should I rather call it “advertising in a digital age” to borrow a familiar moniker – is somehow different. Yes, we service the same clients. And in some instances we market the same products. And, at our worst, we borrow advertising models from old traditional marketing thinly coated with a layer of pixels.

I can only explain this difference based on where we have emerged from. The digital marketing industry is populated by misfits and vagabonds. Wander through an agency and you’re likely to find people who studied to be interior designers, pilots, scientists, engineers, estate agents and philosophers (and that’s just my agency).

This has always been the case. I have often felt that we offer a refuge from the real world – both of advertising and everything else. I have seen people’s faces light up, sometimes with the passing of some time, as they realise they have at last escaped a life of drudgery.

This is exactly the kind of pompous self-regard people outside of advertising hate about us. They laugh at us giving each other awards and lounging on our beanbags in “brainstorms”, pretending, as they see it, to be the artists we are deficient in talent to become.

But again I must protest that digital is different. We are not, generally speaking, graduates of marketing programs and advertising schools. Or even art colleges. We are misfits. We are vagabonds.

And I’ve thought about this a lot: do I love the fact that we are trying to digitally replicate failed advertising models? Of course not. I don’t even love the fact that we are trying to replicate successful advertising models. We are better than that.

And that is what I love. The striving to be better, to invent new things, to not rest or stop until we have completed the revolution that the internet has brought into the world. Or our part of it, anyway.

To build an organization with these lofty goals is a challenge and demands passion and determination. To transform an industry that is set in its ways from many years of doing the same old thing is, at times, a task too great to imagine. To keep ones humility and sanity in a context with its fair share of champagne and gold medals is a daily practice.

But in a world in which no-one wants to consume ads anymore; in which CEO’s have lost patience and faith in their marketing departments; and in which the consumer has more and more of the power; in this world I don’t think the task of re-inventing marketing and the organisations that make it could be in better hands.

So, yeah. I love my job.

To listen to the average vegan extol the virtues of their diet one would be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled across a living saint. They have shunned the bloodied flesh to lead a life of a virtuous and harmonious being.

Unlike you heartless, murdering bastards.

With abstinence of all kinds comes self-proclaimed piety. It is both the gift of a hard choice, and a form of defence against the judgement of others. This is not unique to vegans but it does run deep with them.

This air of superiority is irritating. But is it well earned?

I am a vegan. Or, to put it more correctly, I follow a vegan diet. My reasons are simple: I am horrified by the way in which non-vegan food is produced: the immense suffering of other intelligent species; at a great cost to the planet; and resulting in food that I am scared to put into my body.

For a long while after becoming vegan I lorded it over others like a boy who just got the pretty girl to yield her phone number. It felt like a revelation and I felt others needed to know. And to be ashamed of themselves.

Gradually, however, I came to realise that the line between choosing to do something good and being religious is a fine one. And that, in turn, anything can start to show characteristics of being a religion.

And what defines religion, among other things, is the absolute belief in the correctness of ones own actions; and the commensurate wrongness of everyone else’s.

In my opinion religion is always a mistake because it does not admit other forms of being right and being good. And I notice this trait among vegans, particularly those closely associated with other movements, be they political, spiritual or environmental.

For many vegans there is no being right without eating a vegan diet. They won’t date non-vegans. They won’t eat with them. And most conversations end up in the same place: people who eat animals and animal products are evil perpetrators of a global holocaust.

If you replace a few words in the above sentences with “christian” or “muslim” and related concepts you could just as easily be talking about someone we would call a radical fundamentalist. That’s how extreme these people are.

For some there is an underlying distaste for the human race and the romanticisation of the animal kingdom. They commit a version of the Golden Age Fallacy in which they mistakenly believe animals to be living in a state of peace, harmony and bliss from which we, as a species, have strayed. 

Tell that to the impala that just got suffocated by a leopard and dragged into a tree.

Which is not to say there isn’t a lot of truth and validity in the doctrine. Veganism is a healthy form of diet. Animals and animal farming are huge environmental problems. And torturing and murdering other creatures to put food on our plates is both unnecessary and, I would argue, repellant to most civilised people.

But these vegans commit an error of omission just like everyone else who attaches themselves too closely to one philosophical position. Which is to say they are transgressors in other spheres of their lives. Whether by action – such as burning fossil fuels – or inaction – such as not committing their lives to eradicating poverty or stopping war – everyone does some things right and some things wrong, The difference is that some define themselves by their virtues, and expect recognition for it.

Being vegan is a smart choice – for the planet, the animals and yourself. But so is recycling, looking after AIDS babies and raising happy children. They (and I) should be proud of ourselves for our willingness to make a difficult choice. But that pride is erased by all the things we do which are neither smart or compassionate.

There are clearly people in the world who commit horrible acts with intent and forethought such that we may validly call them evil. But this not the norm. Generally speaking we all come to the table with equally bloody hands, vegans included. Moral superiority is largely a conceit.

I follow a vegan diet. But I’m just as bad as everyone else.

 

Comments are disabled on this blog because I don’t want to field feedback. Feel free to Tweet it though @jarredcinman

I remember every staff member who has ever resigned from my businesses. That may sound like hyperbole but I believe it’s true. It hurts to have someone leave.

I have never understood, as an entrepreneur, the idea that you leave the place where you work. Of course I understand people whose lives careen off the road and who, therefore, have to make unforeseen decisions: to return to another city or to change career paths entirely.

But people who have signed up to do a job, I have always felt, need to make it work. If it’s not good they need to find a different way to do it so that it is. This, after all, is your life and you are in control.

Of course I understand that I am in a unique position having never applied for a job or been for a job interview. Every day of my working life has been in a company I have founded. Perhaps this is why the “will to leave” mystifies me.

I suppose this is something that runs deep in me. I am always the last one to give up hope – in work or in my personal life. Since many people see me as a cynic and someone perpetually pointing out things that could go wrong, this surprises them. Perhaps they mistake my determination for stubbornness. In fact it is far more to do with the simple idea that there is always another way; options unexplored; a reason to believe.

I’ll get back to employee departures in a moment. But I should say a little more on this strand here.

I have seen my share of hopeless situations in my life: company’s on the brink of bankruptcy; projects with impossible deadlines, hopelessly broken and irredeemably off course; personal relationships burned to a cinder with the fire of anger and frustration.

But I think the difference between someone who wins and someone who loses in life is the ability to see through the immediate hardships regardless of how impossible they may be. Let me say that again: regardless of how impossible.

And impossible comes in many forms. It is, in the end, a feeling that you cannot and will not succeed no matter what you try. The ability to face that head on and keep going separates the good from the great.

Which brings me back to staff. I see a lot of people who leave businesses because they encounter hardship in one form or the other. Sometimes for a sustained period. Opportunity abounds, there is greener grass everywhere, and so they move on.

Which is their choice, and, to the extent that they are leaving my company, my own fault.

But I realise in thinking about this now that my hurt stems, at least in part, from the mismatch between my hope and their pessimism. Whatever is wrong we can improve. Giving up is giving up on a chance to learn and grow into a place of discomfort and through it.

This probably means I am likely to go down with the proverbial ship in all spheres of my life. When others have pressed self-destruct I have departed reluctantly, kicking and screaming, and with an abiding sense that if I’d just had another hour. Another day. Another year. That everything would have been better.

And you know what? In almost all cases where I’ve found that extra time, it has been.

There’s this: I’m still alive. That may sound a rather dour way to begin a reflection on the first forty years of my life but, in fact, my survival was never assured. In 2003 I almost died in a car accident, which removed my sense of smell, some of my nerve function and hearing, and a good deal of my fear.

This was a defining moment in my life but not in the way many have imagined. I never experienced a renewed intention to suck the juices from what existence had to offer. I also never developed a terror of driving, or a new respect for road safety. But it did somehow make me feel a little more invincible. If I could survive that, I could survive anything.

I loved my thirties. Which considering this inciting incident may seem strange. They also contained a veritable shopping list of other personal tragedies as mild as failed investments, and as searing as divorce. But being in love, if you can hold that memory through its opposite, changes you for the better. And permanently. Giving love and fighting for it is one of life’s most noble quests, regardless of the outcome.

And then there is my business – the complex, thriving, striving world of an ad agency, which for me is tied with a single thread back to the first business I founded in 1995. Nothing I ever learned or heard about could have prepared me for what this thing has become: for all its imperfections, a fine entrant in an industry that has changed the world. My greatest learning, though, is this: find people you can love and admire, and stick with them. There is no other business secret worth knowing.

Ageing is strange because it is relentless and non-negotiable. As I lift dumbbells I could never have managed in my twenties I am yet constantly reminded of the futility of trying to keep my body young. Words come less quickly than they used to. I get tired more easily. When I look in the mirror I see grey hairs and wrinkles, still, thankfully, in the minority but their march toward dominance has begun.

Cliches abound. Everything you’ve ever heard about getting older, old even, is true. You gain experience but you lose vitality. You resent youth for its rubbery ability to bounce back from anything, but you don’t envy its insecurity. You have more money but less time to spend it. And if you have no children, as I don’t, you worry that you never will.

You look back on the certainty you had when you were eighteen and you laugh. As I now know I will look back at sixty and laugh at myself now.

I have never believed the admonition to live each day like its your last. That may lead to a life of hedonistic pleasure and excitement but you lose periods of tranquility, and you never put down roots. Change is a thrill but it pays diminishing rewards as you get older. As with all wisdom this is a lesson young people need to learn the hard way,

But on turning forty one must pause to consider that life is finite. And that some of things I have not done I will now never do. I will have to live these vicariously through other’s stories. But how fortunate to live at the most connected and information-rich time in human history. All experiences are a few hyperlinks away – or at least a good, long sip of them is.

I celebrate my good health and the opportunities that abound in my life; newfound love and a richness of smart, talented people that I get to interact with every day. And I also celebrate my memories. I have always been a nostalgic bastard, but turning forty threatens to turn me downright sentimental.

Please read this on Memeburn here