Does Comms need another awards scheme?

Ed Davis:

I have a bit of a reputation for taking contrarian positions. Give me any sacred cow in. communications (including advertising and marketing) and I’ll happily poke holes in things. Awards schemes are no different.

Honestly, if you’re an internal or corporate communicator, you probably don’t need another excuse to sit in a hotel ballroom eating lukewarm chicken while somebody mispronounces your job title or name or both

You’re already overworked, under-resourced and operating in a constant state of “can you just quickly…”. You’re holding cultures together through restructures, covering for leadership wobbles, cleaning up after badly thought-through strategy launches, and trying to coax coherent sentences out of very senior people.

And now, apparently, we need yet another awards program to tell us whether we’re doing a good job?

Strategic has just launched the Strategic Global Awards as “a lighthouse for the profession”. It’s a great metaphor. Part of the thinking behind it is that “PR needs PR” and, more bluntly, “PR needs marketing” – a conversation I had with Strategic publisher Orla Clancy in Brussels last September. Fair point. Part of me though still wants to say: maybe instead of building lighthouses, we should get back in the engine room and keep the ship moving forward. Less shiny trophies, more hard graft.

After all, most of the great work in internal and corporate comms is invisible by design. When the strategy lands cleanly, when people don’t panic in a crisis, when change doesn’t feel chaotic, nobody says, “what a beautifully structured cascade plan that was”. They just get on with their jobs. In many organisations, the only time comms is noticed is when (likely unintentionally) overlook something or a program has unintended consequences.

So yes, there’s an argument that awards are a distraction. Navel-gazing. A way for agencies and in-house teams to present their tidied-up case studies to each other while the real work piles up in the inbox.

But, you won’t get that from me in this instance! 

The truth is this: if we don’t take the time to recognize and analyse the best work in our field, nobody else will. Leaders will keep assuming comms is a distribution channel, not a strategic discipline. Budgets will stay small. Teams will stay stretched. And the people doing quietly brilliant work will carry on flying under the radar until they burn out or give up.

That’s why I think Strategic might be onto something with this program – not because the world needs more “we won” or “I’m judging” logos for LinkedIn banners, by the way, I am and we will😉, but because game needs to recognize game.

Done properly, awards force us to do the thing we rarely create space for: to stop, document what we did, interrogate the strategy, the choices, the trade-offs and the actual outcomes and ROI. Not just, “people liked the video” or “people downloaded…”, but “this shifted a behaviour, unlocked a budget, or helped the business make a braver decision”.

They also shine a light sideways—not just upwards. Internal and corporate comms people spend most of their time building the profiles of others: leaders, brands, and/or initiatives. Very little energy goes into pointing that light back on the people who communicated well. A well-run awards programme can correct that imbalance without turning us into peacocks.

There’s another, more pragmatic reason. Our profession is under attack to move faster, master new tech, prove value and fight for influence. When awards become a structured way of surfacing what’s genuinely innovative—the campaigns that persuaded skeptical stakeholders, the approaches that turned dull policy into human stories, the uses of AI and data that actually improved outcomes—they stop being about ego and start being about accelerating the learning curve for everyone.

So, do we really need another awards program? On bad days, I’m tempted to say no and stay in my pj’s and keep my head down to get things over the line. On most days, on better days, I see the value in a global awards program that picks out the smart thinking, the brave decisions and the unsung heroes buried three levels down the org chart.

If the Strategic Global Awards can do that, help the profession see itself more clearly, steal shamelessly from what works and argue more confidently for its rightful place in the boardroom, then let’s go.

Just please Orla and Mike, no cold chicken!

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Ed Davis is Managing Partner, BBN | Agency X

Written by: Editor