Ad industry taking serious awards more seriously

It is logical after all, that if an advertiser wins an award based on effectiveness it follows that it will also be a campaign which most consumers will like.

Looking back over the years, the results have always seemed to be obvious. This year's successes by Polka.com and Hyundai for example, make complete sense. No advertising campaign has been talked about by the ordinary Joe quite so much and quite so positively as the Polka.com campaign.

And the success of Hyundai's advertising is reflected in the fact that the marque has come from chaos here in South Africa only a few years ago to one of the top three motor brands today in terms of sheer sales volume.

Value in Loeries

Now, this does not mean that all the other awards should be scrapped. The Loeries for example, provides great value if only in terms of giving a lot of people in the ad industry a lot of pleasure and a welcome break from a business that for 99 percent of the year involves clients, bosses and colleagues bitching at you all the time.

But, the problem with the Loeries and all the others, is that being events in which the industry judges its peers without any real regard for effectiveness or results, the consumer is more often than not, completely mystified.

Now, a lot of people in the ad industry might well suggest that these awards actually have nothing to do with the consumer and that it should not matter a jot whether the consumer likes the results or not.

The problem, however, is that the advertising industry in this country has openly admitted that it has a huge public perception problem and has been trying for the past few years to get some sort of campaign going to elevate the discipline of advertising to its rightful place in the grand economic scheme of things.

Trivial pursuit

Right now the average consumer thinks that advertising is the most trivial of pursuits and one only has to listen in to radio talk shows when product prices are discussed to hear caller after caller suggesting that the easiest way to reduce food prices is simply to do away with advertising.

The real problem here is that a lot of these callers are actually related or at least know brand managers who buy advertising.

It is vital that consumers understand that advertising is not something whimsical and designed purely to put youngsters into Porches, but rather something that is critical to the economy. The Apex Awards go a long way to creating this sort of credibility and the advertising industry would do well to use them a lot more.