So, how lame is this? For at least the tenth straight year, and while everyone else in town is dusting to make room on their award shelves and swimming in the ink of recent press clippings, Lessing-Flynn was shut out at the Ad Pro’s Des Moines Addy Awards. An overwhelming 132 awards this year and we’ve got nothing to put on the fridge … again? It’s possibly the longest losing streak in advertising history!
Is this what you’d expect from the oldest agency in Iowa? An agency for decades led by Roy “Tuffy” Flynn, former Des Moines Advertising Club “Ad Man of the Year”?
What could be worse than losing in a competition where there are 21 winners of 132 awards? That’s like being the last kid in line when they pass out those green “participation” ribbons at the grade school field days, only to have the teacher run out of ribbons when they get to you.
But failure leads to success right? So, we thought we’d share some insights from this year’s awards and our years of failure:
Apparently it sometimes takes more layers of creative talent than you’d expect to develop award-winning creative. Our founder, Paul Lessing once said (post-humuously): “Extra layers are only good when you’re talking about cake or chickens.” A quick gander through some of the credits for posters, ads, binders, etc. in the award winners book proves that wrong!
A hat tip to part-time Twitter comedian Matt Meszaros from Strategic America for the preciseness of his copywriting on the beer tap handles and to the rest of the team that worked on this project! Wondering if they had to make sure the tap handles worked in a real world setting?
A big shout out to Saturday Mfg. Who would have thought a manufacturer and a bunch of factory foremen 
could steal the show from a town full of advertising wonks with 22 creative awards? Congrats! You win our “Sayles Up and Comer” Award. At $70 a pop for entries (we think), and estimating even a stellar 50% win rate (which would be awesome) that’s more than $3,000. Makes us feel pretty cheap for taking clients to Jethro’s for lunch on “half-price wings” Tuesdays!
Leave it to ZLR and their oversized air bag to sneak out with the Best of Show award. But if I had to put my anti-gambling money on anyone, might as well be them!
To paraphrase a Hillary Clinton quote: “It takes a village to be creative.” Our friends at Red Dot do a great job of listing all their villagers in each of their 21 wins. Hey, it’s all about giving credit and recognition to your peeps, right? And we thought dressing “Goose” up in a too-snug flight suit and aviators was recognition enough. Obviously not!
An apology to the folks at Community Choice Credit Union for naming you Worst of the Week months ago for the long-standing Bills campaign. After so many years, we thought people may be getting tired of the big guys wearing Sharpie-marked t-shirts … but obviously people can’t get enough of those guys!
And a special thanks to the folks at the Iowa Lottery … not for anything related to this year’s Addy’s … but for reminding us that “you can’t win if you don’t play.” Hopefully that message will sink in here for once before next year’s competition.
So, congrats to us! We are our Worst of the Week!
Author: AdMavericks
www.lessingflynn.com
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe some day we should has the hat and enter something?
Nahhhh.
Never mind.
That sucks. Maybe you need to recruit your followers to start stuffing the ballot boxes for the 2011 Addys.
Vote early, vote often!
Take heart Three. I’m always reminded of a Des Moines small car dealer a few decades ago, when asked about the creative award(s) Love Scott won for his campaign said, “awards never sold one car for me”.
I think awards are great, but not more than doing great work, day in and day out. Everyone is starting to recognize Ad Mavericks for your social media game. The awards will follow!
Hey guys, awards aren’t everything. Look at all the award shows that happen throughout the year and sometimes the most deserving don’t get the awards. So what that you’ve gone a decade with no awards – Susan Lucci went like 19 years without a Daytime Emmy, but she still did excellent work as Erica Kane on All My Children – and she did end up winning an award.
You guys are the Susan Lucci of the Ad-world. Don’t get hung up on the awards and keep doing that great work. It will pay off in the end.
I was told a long time ago that winning advertising awards is like urinating while in your neighbors swimming pool…You get a nice warm feeling for a while, but usually no one else notices. So, if the ad worked and the client was happy, that is your reward. I created a magazine ad that was a simple 2-color, and kind of ugly. But it got the highest readership score for the issue and moved a ton of product. I’ll take results (and a happy client/boss) over awards any day.
Susan Lucci! Urinating in neighbor’s pool? Never thought we’d see comments like this in our blog!!! Hilarious! To be honest, we’ve never been big on awards here. They cost a lot. They take a lot of time. And the recognition is more for internal pride than results for clients. Sure we’ve entered some awards over the years (and won) – but haven’t entered any Addy’s for some reason for probably more than 10 years. Nothing wrong with touting creative awards … we just tend to spend more time on doing things that are going to help our clients sell.
I have to admire you guys for calling yourselves the “worst of the week”, but are you making fun of the awards or inspiring yourselves to go for the win even though what judges sometimes find unique and creative doesn’t necessarily sell anything. I also find the Bill’s campaign to be obnoxious, but I have to credit Josh Cook with a big win with this one. That fact that I gave him his first job in the biz when I was at WOI-TV has nothing to do with my enthusiasm for his success (not). He has created something that gets noticed and has certainly played a part in Community Choice going from just under 20,000 members to close to 32,000; doubling deposits and loan volume since he’s came to the job. That’s something that works.
Rod
Susan Lucci?
The mentioning of her name has just made my Saturday…awesome!