Know-How Exchange : Other

*live event

This might well depend on your budget allocation (or on your sponsor generosity) for prizes.

To be worth entering the competition needs to offer tiers
of prizes that increase in terms of their perceived value as desirable and aspirational things: prizes must be worth competing for, worth winning, and must be visually or experientially exciting enough to engage participants into
seeing themselves winning and owning them.

I have a personal thing about competitions for advertising or marketing campaigns. They are a total distraction and insult to professional marketers.

The goal of a marketing campaign is usually to sell stuff, increase market share, make money, or transform a skeptic into a customer. (Insert whatever your objective is here.) The cleverness of the creative or the mechanics are irrelevant and only feed the ego of the person/people who created it.

WHY do you want to enter a competition? What benefit do you expect to realize if you win? How about if you don't win? Isn't it enough to know that what you did has value for the company/client?

Save your energies and funds for important stuff. When most clients/professionals see that you've won some kind of creativity contest they steer clear of you ... because they want RESULTS, not big egos.


P.S. What makes your campaign VERY unique instead of just unique? Doesn't "unique" mean "one of a kind?" If so, what's the difference between "unique" and "very unique?"

Whoops! My bad!

Er ... right. Where were we? Oh yes, competitions.

Hmm.

Agree with Michael and his unique perspective.

I've won a few awards. Felt grand at the time. I've even had some of my work published in an international magazine .. whoohoo for me, right? Yes, and that's about the long and the short of it. My Mum liked the fact that I'd won an award ... and that's just about where the story ends I'm afraid.

Really, the MOST creative, empowering, rewarding competition you can win is the one that beats your client's competitors: real awards come from seeing your client's sales go up. Everything else is simply one lot of creatives or marketers slapping another lot of creatives and marketers on the back. True, peer recognition is great, but client recognition is greater because they're the ones with the most influence over other prospective clients.

I appreciate the feedback. You all have definitely given me a lot to think about.

Yes "unique" means one of a kind so my apologies for saying it was "very unique"...I'm just excited about how many of my customers have become a part of this campaign that seems to be drawing a lot of positive attention, interaction and responses.

I understand some may feel like competitions are just peers patting each other on the back but that's not a bad thing in my mind. For my company, it will help build a portfolio of successes and show the continuous innovative thought process in coming up with the next idea to keep our attendees engaged, learning and coming back time and time again.

I'm not at a marketing firm or even work for one. I'm a business partner who is interested in submitting our campaign for an award not just based on the creativity and engagement of it but for the results we are getting from our customers.

Thank you to those of you have responded.