What happens when brands focus on getting laurels instead of fulfilling their customers' wants?

In 2012, Melbourne Metro released a safety campaign, “Dumb Ways to Die”, to warn people of the dangers near train tracks. It was widely praised, gained critical acclaim, and broke records at the Cannes Lions Festival. The song charted, and the video had hundreds of millions of views.

Later, safety research analysts studied the actual incident data from the Melbourne rail network. They noticed only a small drop in near-misses and accidents, and some analysts questioned whether the campaign actually changed people’s behaviours.

While the campaign was praised, the rail authorities faced the same safety issues.

Two Different Rooms, Two Different Scoreboards

A creative team has one audience in mind when presenting to a client. But when they come under the eyes of festivals and accolades, they begin addressing a different audience: a panel of creative directors who judge based on craft, originality, and cultural impact.

These are two distinct audiences with distinct judgment matrices. Clients judge based on higher sales, better recall, or a bigger market share. Juries, however, look for ideas that push boundaries, move people, or hit a particular creative nerve, regardless of whether they reach the target audience.

Most campaigns don’t have to choose between these two goals, but some do, and that’s what creates tension between them.

Why This Happens

Winning awards does more than just boost an agency's ego. When an agency wins an award like a Cannes Lion, it showcases that win on its website, highlights it in business pitches, and uses it to attract top creative talent. This drive is built into how an agency grows, hires and gets newer, better clients.

In every brief, there's subtext and subtle pressure to build a critically acclaimed campaign. A campaign that focuses on virality and cultural clout might fulfil all jury criteria without having much effect on a client’s needs at the end of the quarter.

No one goes into campaign creation with surface-level intentions. A creative director might honestly believe that an award-winning idea might not exist in a vacuum and will definitely lead to good business for the client, and sometimes it is true. This alignment isn't organic every time, and assuming it is is how campaigns become aesthetically pleasing but lacking in tangible results.

The Work That Doesn’t Get the Trophy

Let’s look at the other side; the pattern becomes clearer then. Comparing ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ with a generic retargeting campaign, over a year, organically boosting a D2C brand’s repeat customer rate by double digits.

This generic campaign delivers cold, hard results, but it will never win a Cannes Lion because it might not be visually creative, might not push boundaries, doesn’t feature a catchy jingle, and no one outside the client’s finance team will ever revisit it. This kind of work is described as ‘solid’ but isn’t praised, even though it has fulfilled the exact function it was meant to perform.

Creative ideas that shape cultures have special, flowery terms, but far fewer words are used for plain ideas that simply boost revenue, showing what a ‘reputation-first’ industry truly values.

Style over Substance

CRED’s IPL ads are a strong example in India. Ads with Rahul Dravid, Katrina Kaif, and Jim Sarbh in 2021 & 2022 sparked a lot of conversation during the season and were widely shared for their offbeat humour and celebrity choices.

Marketers and journalists covering this campaign pointed out one issue: many viewers could refer to the ad, describe it in detail, but couldn’t articulate what CRED actually did. While the ad was catchy, quotable and memorable, the main goal was to make CRED's value clear to a new customer, which was overshadowed by style. While CRED got attention, whether the campaign led to a better understanding of CRED’s core capabilities is a different question altogether.

Can an idea perform both roles?

Simply put, it sometimes can. The Old Spice campaign, ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’, got a lot of industry attention and also led to a huge, quantifiable sales boost for a brand that felt left behind at the turn of a new generation. Ariel’s ‘Share the Load’ won awards in India and actually became a conversation starter and perspective changer around how people talk about and do laundry.

Final Word

A campaign's results, whichever one, matter to someone. A trophy shows what creative contemporaries thought about a concept; a client’s dashboard shows how millions of customers behaved over a period of time. The real cost, however, appears when it is unclear which result the campaign was meant to influence.