Five key points in winning marketing plaudits

Two media-related awards are on the horizon, and media agencies are gearing up in the hope of grabbing those honours. They are the Media Agency Association of Thailand (MAAT) Awards 2016 and Festival of Media Asia (FOMA) Awards 2017.
To say that winning an award is not easy is a gross understatement. Take Spikes Asia 2016 for example. The event received a record-breaking 5,132 entries, for which only 544 individual awards were given across 20 categories. That’s a probability of only 10 per cent that you will win, statistically speaking.
I hate to be the one to open up a can of worms. But as we have witnessed over the years, a handful of cases submitted to the various awards have been overly dramatised or, in some rare cases, blatantly sensationalised to the point of disqualification.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for writing case studies. But there are some basic principles that I have applied over half a decade and have fortunately found success on a few occasions in delivering award-winning submissions.
The five key points are as follows.
Insight: This is the golden word that gets thrown around a lot in marketing, with very few actually knowing the true meaning of it.
Unearthing a profound or hidden insight is the foundation in the development of all great campaigns. Insights usually belong in one of two classes: psychological or cultural. These insights usually lead to opportunities in creating innovative ideas, and subsequently great campaigns.
Always begin your case with a declaration of an unknown insight and impress the judges with something they don’t know about. Set the tone of the story.
National agenda: This is what I usually call the “set-up”. You are creating a springboard from which your story can be launched.
Juxtaposing your brand with a social issue and somehow finding the right linkage between the two contexts, the national problem and the brand problem, is a proven technique that makes a brand narrative that much stronger.
The problem may be cultural and it may have some direct correlation to your market. It’s simply saying to the judges, “My country has this problem. Here is my brand’s mission and this is how we are going to save the world.” The intertwining of two independent but relatable stories into a single narrative gets the jury excited. You’re not lying. You’re simply telling the story better. Indoctrinate yourself with this mindset to give the jury a reason to consider your case.
Brand problem: There is only one Goliath in every category. So assuming you’re not working for a category leader, play the underdog card.
Tell the judges how much smaller your marketing budget is compared with the big boys’. Tell them how much smaller your market share is compared with theirs. Even if you don’t have a social, cultural or national issue to cling on to, your brand problem becomes your main premise. Couple this with your insight, and you have an even stronger narrative to play with.
If you are Goliath, do the reverse. Is the category or your brand shrinking? Tell the judges how competitive the market has become and how you’ve become threatened by the recent movement of competitors. Self-deprecation in the marketing sense works best. Now writing your brand challenge and strategy becomes easy.
Idea: If you work with a client who is a risk-taker and was assigned a mandate to win awards, then lucky you. But that is usually not the case. Always push to deliver innovative and inspiring work that sells. Always think in the back of your mind with every brief, “How can I produce a campaign that can ignite the market and win an award?” Make this the standard.
Explain how the idea was the first of its kind. Tell them how it was first implemented in its category. If it wasn’t the first, tell them how differently you did it. Or tell them how it was a new solution to a conventional media touch point. Use juxtaposition to highlight a particular contrast.
Results: Gather all the necessary data that pertain to your campaign performance.
This is a cause-and-effect situation that needs to be stated in quantified terms. You have already established your marketing key performance indicators in the objectives and your results, will be benchmarked against them.
But sometimes go beyond the obvious. Are there other figures that can be tracked and relayed back to the national agenda? Manipulate the numbers around a bit and you’ll be surprised what can be unearthed.
Submissions for the MAAT Awards are accepted until October 30, and the FOMA deadline is November 25.
This is a nation of great storytellers and I hope they will be out to emulate past successes with these upcoming events. Good luck!

PRADON SIRAKOVIT is associate director, corporate communications, IPG Mediabrands Thailand. Facebook: IPG Mediabrands Thailand. E-mail: [email protected].