I wrapped up a judging assignment for a communications awards competition a while back, and the experience has been preying on my mind.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I have judged IABC’s Gold Quill awards many times, as a division judge, division coordinator, and Blue Ribbon Panel judge. I have also judged programs for other organizations. It has been a few years, though, and the experience of evaluating these 100-plus entries was illuminating.

There is some truly outstanding work being done in PR. The winners are truly deserving of recognition.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the losers and some characteristics their entries shared in common. The fact that so many of them included one or more of these traits is troubling, especially those submitted by major agencies working with budgets that sometimes soared into the millions of dollars.

Advertising Value Equivalancy

Seriously? It has been four years since the PR industry spoke with one voice with the release of the Barcelona Principles, declaring that AVE is not the value of public relations.

If you include AVE as a measure of success in your entry, you will lose. Period.

Impressions

I was particularly struck by the number of entries that listed very specific business-related goals for their campaigns, but used nothing more than impressions to make the case that the effort was successful. If the goal is (for example) to generate three times the number of sales leads the client usually gets, why is the number of impressions the way to determine whether the campaign succeeded? Did you treble the number of leads or didn’t you?

Monitoring impressions is fine as a tactic. If nobody sees your messages, you won’t achieve your goal. (Put this another way: an output is not an outcome.) But touting impressions as the end result demonstrates a palm-to-forehead level of cluelessness about why organizations undertake PR efforts at all. Which leads to my next two observations…

Goal/results alignment

If your results don’t show me how your work helped achieve the goal you specified at the top of the entry, you will lose.

This is my longest-standing gripe about communication entries. I once judged a submission with very clear (and laudable) objectives that were easily measured. The communicator, however, claimed results because several people anecdotally mentioned how well-produced the collateral was and the communications team got a very nice letter from the CEO’s wife.

You might think we’ve come a long way, but my scientific wild-ass guess (SWAG) is that 75% of the entries I just judged featured results that were in no way aligned with the goals.

One reason for this could be that some entrants…

Communicate first, develop the plan later

You can just tell when somebody came up with the communications plan in order to submit a competition entry, after the project has been completed. I read at least a dozen entries I was sure qualified as post-project planning, and I suspect several others took the same approach, though the entries were well written enough that I couldn’t be sure.

In college, I used to prefer essays to true-false and multiple-choice tests, since I could usually bullshit my way through an essay and get at least a passing grade, even if I hadn’t done much studying. That’s fine for a devious student with some writing skills, but employing the same tactic in a competition entry seems to me like trying to bullshit a bullshitter.

Superlatives

I was taken aback by the number of entries that informed me how groundbreaking, unprecedented, unique and innovative their approach was.

If you have to tell me how great your plan was, it must be because I won’t be able to deduce that for myself from reading your plan.

We can do better

As I say, the winners of the competition knocked me out. They set realistic, business-oriented goals, set strategies and tactics designed to achieve those goals, and set metrics up from the outset designed to assess how well the program was doing at meeting those goals. They took original, compelling approaches to their tasks without having to tell me how original and compelling they were. There’s clearly some great work being done out there.

The sub-par entries, though, are reflections of sub-par work. If you’re crafting a plan after the campaign is over just so you can submit a contest entry, you did your company or client a disservice. If you can’t demonstrate how your communication moved the needle—not just how many people saw an element of your campaign—why would anybody want to invest in what you do? If you think AVE qualifies as a measure of effective PR, what are you even doing in this line of work?

We communicators are better than this. Ever the optimist, I’m looking forward to improved entries in future judging assignments.