Think twice about seeking awards for your agency

Most agencies love awards. Larger agencies even have teams devoted to seeking them.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss why the time and money spent on awards may be misplaced.

They even have a suggestion for those of you who may disagree so that you can make a more informed decision about your future investment in awards.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “The amount of time that I see spent wasted on awards to me is just staggering.”

* Gini Dietrich: “I’ve never had that experience where a prospect said, gosh, you’ve won so many awards for your great work. We’ve decided that that’s why we want to work with you.”

* Chip Griffin: “Couldn’t you spend all that time and money in some other fashion? To win better fit clients rather than hoping that someone looks through some list of award winners.”

* Gini Dietrich: “If you stop and you look at it and you say, okay, this is how much time we spent, so that dollar amount is this, this is how much it costs, and then this is what we got in return. You’re going to find the return on investment is not there.”

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I have an award for you today right after this.

I’m just kidding. I don’t have an award for you. Because I don’t believe in them. I think they’re kind of silly.

Gini Dietrich: Well, that’s disappointing.

Chip Griffin: End of show.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. That was fun. Nice to talk to you.

Chip Griffin: Good talking to you too. Well, I guess we probably should, you know, stretch this out a little bit and, and explain some of the rationale here for agency folks, because I know that in the agency world there is an extreme focus on awards.

For many. They seem to love the idea of getting them, touting them, promoting them. And it seems like lots and lots of people give out [00:01:00] awards for the PR community because they know people are interested. Yes. So just about every PR industry publication has their own personal set of awards that they give out.

A lot of associations have their awards. Then there are just random websites that give out awards. You never even heard of them, but you’ve heard of their awards perhaps?

Gini Dietrich: Oh, maybe we should do some awards.

Chip Griffin: That’s, I mean, why not?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Maybe we should do this. This is a really good idea.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And the best part about a lot of these awards is that a lot of them are pay to play.

Correct. Which is a lot more fun. Yeah. Because you have to pay an application fee, Uhhuh , in order to participate in them. Okay, sure. The amount of time that I see spent wasted on awards to me is just staggering.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, in the big agency world, we definitely did them, but there was a team that focused on it, right?

There was an admin [00:02:00] team, which is even more bonkers than that. They paid people to just go after awards. Yeah.