Should You Choose the Award-Winning Agency or the One That Can Show You Results?

The awards problem nobody talks about

I’ve worked with Steph Brown previously. She’s an agency awards expert and I learnt everything about awards from her. I can only hope I do a decent job of translating what I learned!

Here’s something worth knowing about the branding and design industry: awards are self-selecting. Agencies choose which work to enter, pay entry fees, and write the case studies. The best agencies I know, the ones doing serious work with serious outcomes for serious businesses, are often far too busy delivering that work to spend their time writing submission documents and in many cases, sexy time-intensive videos to support an entry. Many of them don’t enter at all – especially to the big well-known ones as the big agencies plough thousands into these and the mid to smaller agencies just can’t keep up.

That doesn’t mean award-winning work is bad, I’ve entered Nalla and myself personally into them in the past. It just means the trophy cabinet is not the reliable proxy for quality that it can appear to be from the outside. What it frequently reflects is an agency’s appetite for entering awards, their relationships within the judging community, and sometimes their ability to produce show-stopping creative that photographs beautifully in a case study but is harder to follow up with a conversation about ROI.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s just useful context when you’re in my friend’s position, weighing up who to trust with something that matters to your business.

Can the most award-winning branding work fail in real life?

The Tropicana redesign is probably the most talked-about example of a creative project that, should have been a success. It was considered by some designers as a piece of boundary-pushing work: minimalist, modern, the kind of clean aesthetic that was widely praised in design circles at the time (the era of every brief being ‘make us look like Apple!’) for its sophistication and clarity. PepsiCo spent a lot of money rolling it out. Within two months of launch, sales dropped by 20%. That’s roughly $30 million in lost revenue. The reason was that customers couldn’t find the product on shelves, as it looked so different! The packaging was quietly pulled and replaced with the original.

The interesting thing about the Tropicana story is that it wasn’t a case of the agency doing just bad design. By the internal metric of the creative industry, much of it was competent work. The problem was that nobody asked the right questions on the front end. Nobody properly investigated how much of Tropicana’s brand equity was tied up in the visual cues they were about to eliminate. The iconic orange-with-a-straw wasn’t just a nice illustration. It was the thing that told customers in two seconds which carton to grab. Strip that out and you strip out the shortcut that years of brand-building had created in people’s minds. You can produce the most boundary-pushing and award-worthy execution in the world and still completely miss the point.

In B2B, the versions of this story are typically quieter but no less costly. Mark Ritson, one of the sharpest brand strategists working today, put it well when he observed that most corporate rebrands fail not dramatically, but pointlessly.

The new logo goes up, the press release goes out, and then absolutely nothing changes. He specifically called out examples like KPMG positioning itself as a “digital leader” and Deloitte introducing a green dot and calling it a strategic transformation.

 

Work that perhaps generated interest in design circles, but added nothing meaningful to the business. The graveyard of professional services rebrands that ticked every creative box and moved no commercial needle is, as he put it, vast.

These are the examples worth sitting with if you’re being dazzled by a shortlist.

But safe isn’t the answer either

I wish to be careful here, because what I’ve said so far could be read as: play it safe, go functional, don’t bother with creativity. However, that would be equally wrong.

There’s a huge amount of B2B branding out there that is beige in the truest sense: unremarkable, indistinguishable from competitors, designed by committee to offend nobody and inspire no one. Work that is ‘on-brand’ in the narrowest possible sense and totally forgettable in practice. That kind of work doesn’t win awards, but its important to highlight that it also doesn’t work.

The real problem isn’t creativity versus results.

It’s creativity that isn’t based on a strategy, which is very different. When creative ambition is guided by a genuine strategic insight, when it starts with a clear understanding of what the brand needs to say, who needs to hear it, and why it matters to them, then the creative work becomes what makes the strategy land. It becomes the vehicle for the business outcome, not an end in itself.

That’s the distinction I’d ask any agency to be honest with you about. Not “are you creative?” but  “does your creativity start with the business problem, or does it start with the aesthetic?”

How to ask the right questions when hiring an agency.

If you’re in my friend’s position, comparing agencies across this spectrum, here are the things I’d push for in any pitch conversation.

Ask them to walk you through a piece of work from the brief to the end – if they don’t conclude with an outcome, let this be a red flag. Be focused on not the concept or rationale for the typeface choices! But what happened in the business as a result? If they can’t tell you, or if they deflect to what the work looked like rather than what it did, that’s something you might want to reflect on.

Ask them what research or insight anchored the creative direction. Great creative work in branding isn’t born in a vacuum. It comes from understanding the audience, the competitive landscape, the brand’s actual differentiators, and the specific behaviour change you’re trying to create. If the answer is vague, that’s another thing to just mull over.

Ask them about work that didn’t go entirely to plan, and what they learned. This is less about the answer and more about the posture. An agency that’s honest about where things got complicated and how they addressed it is almost always more trustworthy than one whose case studies are uniformly triumphant.

And yes, if they have awards, ask them what they’re for. Some awards, like the DBA Design Effectiveness Awards, specifically require entrants to demonstrate measurable business impact through evidence. Winning those is a meaningfully different thing from winning a purely aesthetic category. It’s worth knowing which is which.

The honest answer to my friend’s question

It isn’t either/or. The framing of “bold creative agency” versus “results-focused agency” is a false binary, and any agency presenting itself as having to choose between the two should probably tell you something.

The best branding work is creative because creativity makes it memorable, distinctive, and emotionally powerful. And it produces results because it was never only about looking good. It was about changing something: a perception, a behaviour, a market position.

What I would say if pushed is this: if you have to choose, choose results. Not because creative excellence doesn’t matter (I’m a designer, I live and breathe creativity), but because results are the test of whether the creative excellence is a solution to a commercial problem. A brand that looks beautiful in a case study but hasn’t shifted your pipeline, improved your ability to attract the right clients, or given your team a clearer story to tell hasn’t done its job, no matter how many judging panels it impressed.

And given that a huge number of the agencies doing genuinely effective work don’t enter awards at all, because they’re too busy doing the work, the trophy count is probably the least useful thing to weigh in that decision.

Ask for the evidence and what changed.
Ask what the business looks like now versus before.

Those are the questions that will tell you who to trust.