Are awards still worth it?

This week, the great and good of the global advertising, marketing and communications world descended on the South of France for the Cannes Lions and by all accounts, it's bigger than ever. Oprah Winfrey picked up the LionHeart Award. Sports marketing, social media influencers and corporate heavyweights all jostled for position on the Croisette. And an independent performance marketing agency moved into the beach space vacated by WPP and filled it with an AI sandbox. The landscape is shifting, but the appetite is not.

All of this against the backdrop of last year's scandal, in which Brazilian agency DM9 was stripped of 12 awards, including a Grand Prix, after it emerged the entries contained manipulated, AI-generated content fabricating real-world campaign results. Its Chief Creative Officer resigned. Cannes responded with mandatory AI disclosure rules, detection tools and an ethics committee. The industry took note. This year's entries, it's fair to say, have been scrutinised rather more carefully.

So, it's a good moment to ask the question that doesn't get asked enough: are awards actually worth it?

The honest answer on cost
Let's start with the numbers, because they're significant. For a mid-size agency attending Cannes, submitting award entries across multiple categories, flights, accommodation, passes and a reasonable level of presence, you're looking at well over €200,000. For a large agency with a beach house, a sponsorship and a serious awards programme, the investment runs into seven figures.

Will you get ROI on that? For the agencies rubbing shoulders with the CMOs and CEOs of the world's biggest brands, possibly. For everyone else, the honest answer is probably not. At least not in any measurable near-term sense.

And that's before you question whether the awards themselves are worth winning. Anyone who's worked in this industry long enough has seen it: the year you sponsor a table, your chances improve. The year you don't, they don't. Entry fees create their own barriers. Judging panels, however well-intentioned, bring their own biases and blind spots.

This isn't unique to Cannes. It's the nature of award schemes, and it's worth being clear-eyed about it.

What awards were supposed to do, and what they actually do
There was a time (the Noughties and earlier), when being 'award winning' was a meaningful tick in the procurement box. If you wanted to get onto the supplier list for a P&G or a PepsiCo, it helped. Today, it sits a long way behind price transparency, ESG compliance, DEI reporting and demonstrable ROI. For enterprise procurement, a trophy cabinet is neither here nor there.

And at a certain level, the Cannes Lions is, let's be honest, a lot of creatives looking at each other's work and applauding each other. Whether the multi-million-pound campaign actually moved the needle in any commercially meaningful sense is rarely the first question asked. (That said, if Levi's don't clean up over the next twelve months for their FIFA World Cup work, there is no justice).

So why bother?
Because the case for awards, done right, is real. It's just different from the one usually made.

For talent, recognition matters enormously. People want to see their work celebrated, and the internal culture effect of winning, or even shortlisting, is genuinely significant. Teams that feel their work is seen and valued perform better and stay longer. That's not soft; it's commercial.

For new business, 'award winning' still carries weight. Just not in the boardroom procurement meeting. It signals quality and ambition to the kinds of clients who care about those things, and it's a credible shorthand on a website, in a credentials deck, or on a CV. The signal is real, even if the causality between winning and winning clients is harder to draw.

And for networking, there is genuinely no substitute for the kind of concentrated access that events like Cannes provide. The conversations that happen at the dinner, on the beach, or at the satellite events around the main festival are often more valuable than anything that happens inside the Palais. That's true whether you're there as an agency, a brand or a supplier.

The bottom line
Awards are worth pursuing but the return depends entirely on why you're entering, which awards you choose, and what you're prepared to spend. Cannes Lions is a particular kind of investment, suited to a particular kind of ambition. For most agencies, the smarter play is a portfolio approach: a handful of well-chosen, well-entered awards that actually reach the clients and talent you want to reach, rather than a scatter-gun approach or a single high-cost bet on the Croisette.

And none of that requires manipulating your case study film with AI. Hopefully that's now obvious to everyone.