Award Shows Don’t Matter. Except They Do.

I was 22 and in the first weeks of an internship at Grey, New York. That internship taught me many important lessons but none greater than this one: you cannot eat two slices of pizza every day for three months and expect to have blemish-free skin, no matter how young you are.

But there is another thing that sticks out about that internship.

A few of us took a field trip to visit the One Club to see the work of Fallon McElligott. Walking through the One Club doors and standing in front of all their amazing work was an eye-opening experience for a young creative with 400 grams of carbs coursing through his veins. Every ad was awe-inspiring and hysterical. But there is one that stood out above all others: an ad for the French Open that only featured a visual – a tennis ball in the shape of a croissant. No headline. Just the name of the event.

I left blown away. A tennis ball. Shaped like a croissant. So simple but it got the point across succinctly. Fallon had the best headline writers in the business, but they didn’t even need one this time. Later that week when I was having dinner with my family, they asked what my favorite ads were. I mentioned only one: The tennis ball. Shaped like a croissant.

They stared at me dumbfounded.

I explained the ad again. Tennis ball. Croissant.

Silence. Then….

“Why would anyone eat a tennis ball?”, “Do the French make their tennis balls that way?”, “That’s not funny.”

Such is the business we’re in.

The ideas we marvel at are never viewed with the same reverence outside our industry if they’re seen at all. But every year we enter award show season and start the same endless debates: “no one saw it, it only ran once, it’s awards bait.” And I’m here to tell you:

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter if it only appeared once or not at all or was funded entirely by the agency or led by creatives who only want the trophy and the next job offer. Because award shows have never been an indication of wide acceptance (even if every case study video has impressions and headlines and Twitter posts that say otherwise). Award shows are a measure of the idea.  That’s it. And by measuring the idea they push our industry forward – by pushing all the creators forward. It doesn’t matter if your parents get it, or anyone outside of our industry gets it (they don’t). What matters is that WE see it, it inspires us in some way, and it allows us all to expand our thinking to push the boundaries of our own creativity.

Neil French said, “award shows are like concept cars,” and besides it being the shortest thing Neil French has ever written it’s also the truest. No one is driving a concept car off the lot. But the design of that car, or the engine of that car, or the computer system of that car will influence a helluva lot of car designers.

When a UPC code won a Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes did any consumer notice? Not a chance. But did it cement the idea that creativity can happen anywhere to a generation of creatives – even on the back of a package of soap? Yep.

Books that clean drinking water. Emojis that order pizza. Potholes that tweet. Amazing ideas, all of them, which then inspired thousands of other big and small acts of creativity around the globe for clients big and small. And that excites me, as it has every year since that first day I walked into the One Club.

So, this year, I’ll pour through the winners, applaud the creativity, and like every LinkedIn post I see on the subject. I may even have two slices of Ray’s Original just for old time’s sake – although I’m dabbing my napkin on the grease first.

The Five Creative Delusions

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” – Gustave Flaubert

That quote was pasted above the first desk in my first cubicle at my first job 20 years ago for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t understand that the office furniture was leased and, two, it always reminded me to come into the office ready to work and leave the office ready to recover – even when all I had to look forward to the next day was a 5×5 cubicle on loan from United Rentals.

But what the hell do we do now?

Our lives no longer follow clear patterns. Our cubes and offices have been traded for something much worse – our couches and uncomfortable dining chairs. The regular and orderly home lives we’ve spent so much time constructing unraveled in an instant, and the work lives we spent so long gearing up for unraveled right along with them.

Like many, I spent those first weeks praying for a return to normalcy. But as days stretched to weeks stretched to months, I realized I needed to call in something else to help me. First it was boxes of wine (thanks to our client, Bota Box) but then I looked to the one thing that has guided my career thus far.

Creative Delusion.

Delusion is one of the greatest assets a person can have. (Hear me out on this). It’s creative delusion that makes us think we can win a new business pitch against 20 other agencies. It’s creative delusion that we think our video is going to be the one people see out of the 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s creative delusion that we think all that wine we’ve been drinking since March isn’t going to catch up with us. All of these things make us want to work hard and try hard and drive us to do the seemingly impossible or improbable time and time again.

But while being slightly delusional is a healthy thing for anyone in communications, we all need to recognize that right now we don’t need anything else hindering our lives. To that end, here are five creative delusions I have recognized that get in the way of creating great work.

1. We don’t have time for a brief. After nothing happened in our industry for weeks, every client hit the accelerator and jammed it into fourth gear all at once. The reaction was to meet them in 4th My suggestion? Apply the brakes. Stop. Think. And then stop again and think some more. In our race to be helpful we forget that real help is solving the problem, not being the first to throw out a solution. Einstein said “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Let’s all be like Einstein.

2. Aha! I alone have the answer. We’re frustrated when people don’t share our speed or thought process. So we put our head down and deliver an idea to everyone expecting a standing ovation. Don’t fall into this trap. Collaboration is always important but even more so right now. It’s good to have disagreements if those disagreements lead to better solutions.

3. You need to be in the meeting (even if you don’t know why you’re invited to the meeting). We’ve always had too many meetings yet, incredibly, we have figured out a way to squeeze even more of them into a day. No one has ever finished a long day and wished there was more time in the day for meetings.  We all want the same thing – more time to work.  Here’s my advice –if you are the one scheduling the meeting, make sure the purpose of the meeting is clear.  And if you’re an attendee who doesn’t know what the meeting is for, skip it.

4. I can’t leave my house/desk/etc. When I hit a creative block before, I could walk out of my office and play a game of chess, talk to a friend or eat an embarrassing amount of licorice from the snack closet. We don’t have that now. Steve Jobs designed the Apple campus with bathrooms in the middle to encourage people to bump into one another, to have casual conversations and to promote creativity. David Ratcliffe from Google called these “Casual Collisions” – the inadvertent meetings that lead to new ideas and solutions. So block out 30 minutes a day to do something different – go for a walk, talk to the guy at the coffee shop, yell at cars.

5. Don’t be afraid to break the rules. Let’s say you wanted to title your blog post “the five creative delusions” but only could think of four. That’s okay. Stop being so hard on yourself. And while you’re at it, pour another glass of wine (thanks, Bota Box).