After we had heard all the presentations of these papers, one of my fellow judges turned round and said: “It is such a joy to be able to take a step back from it all, take a breath, and just listen. It has reminded me what an amazing industry this is, how many brilliant people there are in it, and how lucky we are. That was such a pleasure.” It was how we all felt. And I hope you are able to get some of that feeling yourselves from reading these papers.
As ever, there are some cracking papers for all of us to take inspiration from and to learn from. Thank you to everyone who entered for all your efforts in pulling them together and sharing your thinking with the Planning community and beyond. Special thanks to our friends from Canada for sharing their work; you’ll read some great papers from them. The continued commitment to entering is especially appreciated this year, in what have been particularly challenging times for many.
In these cases you’ll come across a mix of papers from big companies to small, commercial brands to charities. What you will also see are some truly brilliant branded ideas; and this is what I’m most delighted by. We can all think of examples of advertising awards given to amazing ideas that aren’t actually that amazing because they have one fatal flaw - they have absolutely no connection to the brand, and therefore no impact on the business. Here you will see multiple ideas that are hardwired to their brands. As a result, you can be sure the ideas will have impact on the brand’s business.
The quality of the people writing and presenting these awards shows that Planning is in great hands. It is such a wonderful job to do and, going from these papers, the world continues to open up before us.
Planners can go wherever they want to go - diving into data, developing comms plans, fine-tuning channel mixes, playing with technology, coming up with great partnership ideas, even creating products. The world is there for the taking - go grab it.
The Long Term Thinking papers continue to be a great addition to the awards, showing the value of professional brand stewardship over time - there’s gold in them thar hills. But of course, all the papers are worth a read; you’ll find something interesting and useful in each and every one of them. Enjoy.
Charlie Snow
Brand and Advertising Consultant
Chair of Judges, 2021
You can read all the Awards papers on our APG Think Tank - Free to APG Members only
