It’s not easy running an industry award show these days. There are too many shows and they’re too expensive. Agencies consistently submit fake work to game the system, there’s little new blood among the judges and teams are reticent to travel to elbow-rubbing ceremonies in NYC, London and Cannes in this economy. All of which means it is time for award shows to innovate.
D&AD and The One Club, the two organizations renowned globally for their iconic Pencil Awards, have announced a joint initiative aimed at identifying the absolute leaders in creativity internationally.
The Pencil Rankings, will allocate points based on the results from The One Show and the D&AD Awards alone. The two organizations are committed to the most rigorous standards of judging quality, and every year assemble the world’s most feted creative professionals to sift through tens of thousands of entries from all around the world.
Launching early next year, The Pencil Rankings will measure both individual advertising and design agencies as well as networks on their overall performance in the two shows. There will also be a Client of the Year title.
D&AD CEO Tim O’Kennedy said: “There are many awards shows around, but the two most demanding, most rigorous and most coveted in the creative world are The One Show and D&AD. We thought it was time to offer our clients – and their clients – a simple and utterly transparent barometer of their creative performance in this, the Superleague of shows.”
