Our industry loves an award now the Crocodiles are done and dusted for 2025, the Cannes Lions are back to remind us just how hard they are to win, writes Kathleen Gunther, founder of Gunther Consulting. Unless you have Tim Minchin writing you a banger that arguably would’ve won without the fancy production, you’re probably not alone in dismissing these creative awards as self-indulgent industry theatre.
That’s exactly what I used to think and I wasn’t shy about sharing my opinion either! Until Anne Boothroyd schooled me on their true impact, that is.
Anne, who’s spent over 20 years pushing creative boundaries, including winning coveted Effies, D&AD Wood Pencil and Axis Awards, was my ECD at Creative Agency YoungShand in Auckland. While seated together at a Christmas function, she (kindly) explained how very wrong I was. Little did I know while knocking back my Quartz Reef Brut, that this one conversation was a pivotal moment in my career.
“Curiosity,” she said. “That’s what awards really foster.” Along with a myriad of positive outcomes that hold us all to account, but as a creative, it was curiosity that fuelled this cat.
When I approached Anne to do this video with the lens of curiosity, she said “The advertising industry has become addicted to performance marketing, and it’s understandable why. The metrics are immediate, the ROI is measurable, and the accountability is clear. But we now have a robust and growing body of research proving the critical importance of brand building, creativity, and emotional connection.”
This is where awards become transformative rather than decorative.
“When we enter awards, we strive to create the best possible work,” Anne explained. “We strive to create work that hasn’t been imagined yet. We strive to create something we don’t know how to build.”
Awards were the industry’s OG innovation labs before AI. They create a unique pressure that forces us beyond our comfort zones, pushing us to respond to humanity’s challenges and technological changes in ways we never considered possible. The result? A new wave of work that doesn’t just win trophies but fundamentally pushes the entire industry forward.
Awards cultivate curiosity by creating space for experimentation that client briefs rarely allow. They encourage us to ask “what if?” instead of “how much?” They reward the audacious over the safe, the breakthrough over the incremental.
Most importantly, this curiosity-driven work becomes the foundation that the next generation of campaigns will stand on. Every award-winning campaign that seemed impossible to build becomes tomorrow’s creative baseline. Every boundary-pushing idea that emerged from pure curiosity becomes next year’s industry standard.
The profound truth Anne illuminated is that awards don’t just celebrate great work but actively generate it. The curiosity they foster creates a ripple effect that elevates standards across agencies, inspires teams to reach further, and ultimately delivers better outcomes for brands and businesses.
In a landscape increasingly dominated by algorithmic optimisation and AI drivel, curiosity becomes our most valuable creative currency. Awards shows remain one of the few spaces where this currency is not just accepted, but celebrated.
Whether your work takes home a trophy or not, the curiosity sparked by pushing creative boundaries ensures the entire industry walks away richer.
This is the second in a three-part series exploring the impact of industry awards through the lenses of Connection, Curiosity, and Accountability.
