How do you really know if an idea is any good? Can you truly judge creative work without getting tangled in your personal taste or letting your biases get in the way? In this episode of Now Go Create, I dig into the messy, often emotional process of evaluating creative ideas.

It's award show season, and competition for gongs is fierce. I’m joined by my fellow judges for the Creative Moment Awards by top-of-their-game creative directors Kim Allain (Golin), Greg Double (Burson), strategist Gemma Moroney (SHOOK), and the king of creative excellence, Arif Haq. Together we pull apart what “good” actually means, and how you can bring real objectivity and confidence to your feedback, judging, or sign-off.

You’ll hear about three powerful frameworks I’ve honed through years of practice and study, which can help you move from gut feel and fuzziness to clear, actionable creative decisions. If you’ve ever agonised in a judging room or struggled to explain what you think about a creative concept, this is the episode I wish I’d had when I started out.

Highlights:

• Why creative evaluation is so tricky: where instinct meets process, personal taste clashes with objectivity, and why that tension is essential  
• How Heineken’s Creative Ladder gives you a “dictionary” of creativity, and a shared language to discuss what’s great, bland, or legendary in your ideas  
• Testing for authenticity: Kim Allain on digging below the case study to see if an idea really had impact and relevance  
• IDEO’s Lifeline Cards: Seven lenses (Heart, Beauty, Brains, Bravery, Magic, Mastery, Destiny) that unlock richer creative conversations and better feedback  
• The effectiveness lens: James Hurman’s ladder for measuring results from behaviour change to brand fame  
• Field wisdom: When “good” is a feeling in your gut, and when it’s time to step back and question what’s driving your opinions  
• The practical side: Frameworks, worksheets, and questions you can use to level up your creative conversations, pitch, or awards judging  
• How to fight for someone else’s idea and why strong critical thinking means challenging your own biases, too.

Do you have a bold story or breakthrough you want to share, or a creative challenge you want Claire to discuss next, or a creative dilemma you’d like her to tackle on the show? Email claire@nowgocreate.co.uk.

About Claire Bridges 

Claire Bridges is Chief Spark and Founder of leading creative training consultancy Now Go Create, whose philosophy is that everyone can be creative.

Claire worked as Managing Director and Creative Director working with global brands including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone in her previous PR career. Upskilling individuals, teams and organisations with practical creativity tools is Claire’s mission. 

She’s one of only 250 people globally to hold an MSc in Creativity, Leadership & Innovation, and authored an Amazon best-selling creative handbook In Your Creative Element based on her academic studies.

Claire and her hand-picked team of experts have worked on thousands of creative projects and trained over 40,000 people around the world since starting Now Go Create in 2011.

Join our weekly email for free resources and worksheets to go with the podcast here http://eepurl.com/dtrWZf

Connect with Claire:

Website: https://nowgocreate.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowgocreate/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NowGoCreate

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/claire-bridges-b6205b14

Creative Moment Awards: https://www.creativemomentawards.co/

Produced by winteraudio.co.uk

This is the episode I wish someone had made for me when I first started reviewing creative work many years ago.

Because here's the thing, it's tricky.

We all know it's not an easy task.

Judging creative work is part instinct, part learned skill.

As the IPA puts it.

It's both rational and emotional.

It's where personal taste collides with process, and that tension is what makes it so hard and so human.

But what if you had tools, language and clarity to actually know what makes an idea great?

That's what we're going to look at today.

Welcome back to the Now Go Create podcast.

I'm Claire Bridges and today we're diving into the sticky but essential part of creative life.

How do you evaluate or judge creative work?

Former ad agency chief Bruce Haines said, every time you assess a new idea, what you're really trying to do is manage, change you.

You can either cope with it or force the pace of it.

If you ever have to decide whether a fledgling idea is going to make it to the next stage, or if you're in a position to evaluate or be asked to judge creative work presented to you, then today you'll get three powerful frameworks to help you evaluate creativity with more confidence, clarity and consistency.

Or, as my friend Arif Hack, who we're going to hear from later, would say, make creativity boring.

When the chairman of Leva Faberge was presented with a new idea for the at the time flagship brand Lynx Axe, he apparently said, I hate it.

I'm sure it will be very successful and I love that quote because it's the ability to try to evaluate anything, not just your ideas, but objectively, which is so tricky.

It's award show season, with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity just around the corner, where the competition for the coveted gongs is fierce.

As they say themselves, success at the festival is no easy feat.

Each year, only 10% of all the entries will make the shortlist and only 3% will win an award.

Today we'll also hear from three brilliant PR agency creative directors, Kim Allain, Greg Double and Gemma Maroney, who are all fellow judges with me for the upcoming Creative Moment Awards, and they're going to share their valuable insights on how they judge ideas in the real, real world.

The Creative Moment Awards celebrate innovative, inspired and exceptional creative work across PR commas and marketing.

So I'm really excited to get into what the other judges are looking for and how they decide whether a creative idea has delivered.

As I mentioned, I'm also talking to my friend and professional collaborator, Arif Hack, an ex Pepsi marketeer who developed the award winning Heineken Ladder with Contagious as a way to have a shared language around creativity.

Here's a little taster of what's to come from Golan's Kim Elaine hi, I'm Kim Elaine.

I'm associate creative director at Golin.

I always go in quite a bit harsh and I look at the authenticity of it because I think sometimes, especially when we're in kind of judging season for awards, etc.

People know how to build a really good case study, really good case video for the creative that they're putting into the award show.

My thing is like, how do we dig underneath that and actually see what impact it had to actually see that it was relevant to the audience it was speaking to, to see that if it is a purpose entry, that the creative actually had kind of bigger standing in the world rather than just something that was done for an award entry.

So I do quite a bit of like digging into the authenticity of it.

So I'll go and look at the coverage that came from it, the comments that are underneath the socials.

I look at the kind of impact that it's had.

I look at the strategy because as much as I'm a creative, I have a why.

And I really want to dig into the why have we done this?

Why is this creative relev.

Where does it stand in the world?

Where does it stand in a specific community?

Because I might not understand it from my background.

However, the strategy should tell me why it made a lot of sense.

It's such a big thing to me about authenticity because we we clap for ourselves all the time in awards.

We're like, oh yeah, well done.

And we applaud it within our circles.

But did it penetrate outside of our circle is the biggest thing for me.

Creating can be emotional and emotive and creative work and evaluating can be really subjective.

But in a business context, we also need the work to be effective and to meet the brief that was set.

When I was researching my book, I came across a formula for creativity from someone called Dr.

Ruth Knoller.

And she said that she was a mathematician and she said that creativity is a function of knowledge, imagination and evaluation, all influenced by a positive attitude.

So today we're really focusing on that last part evaluation.

PR agency Shook co founder and strategist Gemma Maroney says that real creativity is what changes how people think, feel or act, whether or not it gets a trophy.

And as Burson creative director Greg Double said, creative directors love to create mystique around their work as if it's being plucked from some great creative tree.

I hate it when it's whimsical and too artsy.

I'm the most commercially minded creative director I know.

The best ideas are the ones that get sold.

They're the ones that give people jobs, they're the ones that pay account executives, and they're the ones that keep our business going.

So I'm going to share three different ways to think about creative work that I've discovered over the years and I've found helpful.

I've had to really hone my own gut feel for this too, and I've really learned to try to interrogate it.

Am I reacting about this idea or campaign or award entry instinctively or am I defaulting to my personal taste or bias or something else?

And of course all of those things are going to be at play.

We just can't help it.

But that is why I've come to love tools like the ones we're discussing.

Because they help move you from that sort of fuzzy confusion to much clearer thinking.

And sometimes in a judging room or a situation, you've got to be able to fight for someone else's idea.

Most of the time that's what you're doing.

It's not your ideas you're defending.

So that means you've really got to sharpen your critical thinking.

And I find having frameworks help me to structure my thoughts.

So first up is the Heineken Creative Ladder.

I wrote about this in my book and it's a ten step tool designed to help marketing teams and anyone actually evaluate the ambition and originality of ideas.

This framework was developed by my friend and collaborator, Arif Haq when he was at Contagious and he told me about how the idea came to be.

Making creativity more boring for me is about making it more predictable, repeatable and therefore scalable.

So all my work is focused on not how you make a team of 10 people more creative, but how you make a team of 100 or 100,000 people across different continents, different offices, different categories, different types of work more creative and as just much more complicated as you know.

And in that quest, boringness is really important.

What I mean by that is in my experience the problem is not people needing to be inspired about the value of work or just be immersed in brilliant, award winning work.

And you know, inspiration is, there's plenty of that.

There's even a lot of my work is involved in helping people generate better ideas.

There's even not much of a problem, I think with people just being able to generate extraordinary ideas.

The biggest problem in my experience, and bear in mind I came from client side 10 years at PepsiCo was actually getting those ideas evaluated, like what is a good idea, what's a bad idea?

And feeding back based on feeding back to about work, selling that work internally to your president or general manager or the budget owner or whoever it is.

And therefore that's somewhere where like a relatively boring tool like the ladder.

And I just go, is a dictionary?

What's more boring than a dictionary?

And yet I love a dictionary.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

Dictionaries are fundamental and they just hold all the core knowledge.

So that's all the ladders.

Ladder is.

It's a dictionary for about being able to articulate your view on what is good and what is bad.

I love that.

I love that idea of dictionary.

And it really speaks to say that having a shared language, having a way that we can all understand and know exactly what we mean by the language.

Because even just the word creativity, if you ask people in a room to give you a definition of what they think is creative, you'll get wildly different things.

So, yeah, I think that's really helpful.

Can you explain how the ladder works?

Yeah.

So it starts as the basic thing that I always say is treat it like a dictionary.

It's not a scoring system.

It's mainly a dictionary for you to be able to.

I call.

Gives you an objective scaffolding for your subjective opinion.

So it's not trying to get everyone to agree.

It's actually helping everyone disagree just as much as before, but now they're disagreeing more objectively.

And I've seen it in rooms when you take out the kind of the classic.

Well, I don't like it because.

Insert subjective reason there.

I don't like it.

You've seen that too.

All day.

We've seen it.

Right.

When suddenly you go, okay, I still don't like it.

I disagree with you.

But now I can understand where you're coming from and you can understand where I'm coming from.

Right.

Let's have an objective discussion.

And just that really simple.

As I say, it's just completely simplistic.

It's completely.

It's not a revelation.

Just having a shared language between you and I.

Yeah.

Means we can have a more objective discussion about what good or bad looks like.

Critically, because we share that language, we can neuter to some extent.

Extent.

The relative inexperience or experience that you and I might have.

Let's say I'm the client.

I was trained in probably a business type degree.

And my background is more a business related versus you being a, you know, might be a creative director, won all the awards in the world and you maybe did art, you know, or graphic design.

You've got all the film references, the cultural references.

I've got virtually nothing relatively.

It helps and even up the ground a little bit in our relative inexperience.

And so suddenly I can start going a little bit more, not try and compete with you, but I've got a bit more ammunition to be able to talk to you about creativity.

But then critically, I've got a language now to go to my boss who's thinking about running a general manager running huge businesses and suddenly then I can give him or her a language that I can then say, ah, right, well, here's something we can both agree and objectively a discussion to approve or not approve work.

So when you talk about that language, what are the words on the ladder?

So can you just quickly take through, you know, the, the 1 to 10 on the ladder.

You talked about the numbers, but what the actual words are.

And I know there's, when you talk about dictionary, I know there's a whole little booklet, you know, the dictionary that literally goes with it to try to explain that, but just to give people, if they haven't seen it and if they google the ladder, they'll find it.

And it's in the first chapter of my book as well.

Yeah, and there's lots of articles out there about it.

But what are the 10 stages on the ladder?

On the kind of the core ladder.

And actually most of the ladders in existence have words that aligned very closely to these because you can change the words as long as you fundamentally retain the meaning.

They start at the bottom on the 10 point version of the ladder with destructive.

That goes to 2 hijacked, 3 fusing, 4 cliche, 5 ownable, 6 fresh, 7 groundbreaking, 8 contagious, 9 cultural phenomenon and 10 legendary.

4 is the middle cliche that's most branded communications in the world.

They get completely not noticed, not rem, not understood, not acted upon.

And the other thing to note, I guess as you're going up the ladder is it literally is a ladder.

So you can't be a 7 groundbreaking unless you are also a 6 fresh or a 5 ownable.

So that's the other thing.

Sometimes people think that you can leapfrog to the top, put a gorilla in a jockstrap, as David Obree said, and just go, right, we'll just go straight there to contagious no, no.

Is the idea ownable by that brand?

Does it bring an interesting, fresh point of view?

And so on and so forth.

What I find really interesting about it is that as soon as you say the words, I can start to think about, okay, that's so I know what destructive means.

I know that you know that.

That, That's.

That's to be avoided at all costs.

I know that hijack means okay, it's.

It's not ownable.

Somebody else can do it.

And the one that I.

That I really like, which I think is really interesting, almost as a trigger for creativity as well as an evaluation metric, is the stereotype and the cliche.

Because immediately I can start thinking about, okay, what am I doing in my space that is cliched?

Everything from the packaging through to how I represent people in my advertising through to where in the store?

Like, everything about that gives me almost like a creative trigger as much as it does a way to evaluate it.

And you can sort of do that all the way up, which is what I find really interesting.

And when I first came across the ladder and when I first came across your work and when I was researching my book, I think the great thing about frameworks and.

And things like the ladder is that it just starts to help demystify this thing we call creativity.

And as you say, helps me to have some confidence in a conversation with someone else about what I think it help to give me the scaffolding for my thinking.

And there might be other ways of doing that, but at least it starts to make me challenge my own biases, challenge my own ways of thinking.

And that I remember when I first saw the ladder, thinking it's one of those brilliant things.

It's codifying, trying to codify creativity in one way.

It's not to say that it's perfect.

I think, you know, we've talked about this before.

We've worked together.

I think you share a quote which is like, all models are.

All models are useless.

What's the quote?

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Yes, exactly.

So it's that sort of sense that there's just different ways of trying to think about things.

And I think for anybody who, you know, we're talking about evaluating creative work, we're talking about judging creative work today.

Anyone who suddenly is faced with having to judge creative work, if you were all day, every day, give me that ladder to help me to structure my thinking rather than me trying to do it from a blank page.

Exactly right.

I love that, what you said there, that the Word confidence.

And that really does strike.

Bear in mind, I did when I did the Ladder, I just joined Contagious, relatively.

I'd been just coming out 10 years as being a client.

And the biggest thing in my mind was if we go back to that story from before, I'm the client, you're the creator, director, and you won everything.

And I'm just, you know, I just want a brand and understand my business, but not this thing called creativity.

And suddenly I, I am suddenly like Julius Caesar saying, no, this is bad and this is good.

It's incredibly awkward for a client.

And so you revert back to things you do know and do feel safe in and do make you try and keep some semblance of professionalism.

So you go into the brand mandatories and the pantone colors and the features and you know the things because you can't, you don't want to go into this awkward area that feels completely subjective.

And suddenly certainly I did is I kind of went, I regressed and I gave this kind of weird feedback that wasn't really feedback.

And I've seen the Ladder, let's say two or three day training someone at the beginning you can see openly and you'll see classic check in exercise.

At the beginning you say, tell us your views about creativity and your capacity or your skills or what do you want to get out of the session.

And people will openly say, this scares me.

I am not creative.

I did an MBA and I feel awkward and da da.

And actually I'm not creative and da da da.

And obviously you and I would go, well, you are creative, you're a human being.

We start there.

And then you see, just by giving them tools, like giving them the ladder, giving them that scaffolding, you can see their confidence grow in front of your eyes and which is a facilitator who's so beautiful.

And that confidence unlocks leaning in and that eventually unlocks habit and that unlocks mastery.

For someone that literally a few hours ago would go, no, no, this is like just, I don't want to go anywhere near this because it's not what I know.

That's all it is a very practical way, I call it of like giving people the confidence to be able to articulate their opinion.

Where can people find out about it?

Hack?

Is there anywhere you'd point anyone to find out about it?

Oh, actually recently I've started, I've written a primer, actually because I get asked this question a lot.

I've written a primer.

It's fairly Short and I can send a link out, a primer on what it is, what it isn't, sort of myths and misconceptions about it and also just some tips.

So if you are thinking about doing it, like what to avoid and what.

To think about, that's fantastic.

Thank you.

We'll put that into the show.

Notes.

Thanks so much, Hack.

Cheers, Claire.

I loved hearing from Hak about how the creative ladder came into existence and how it can be used in really practical ways.

And I've seen some real penny drop moments with people when I've shared the Heineken ladder and some of the other models I'm going to share with you because it helps people to breathe a sigh of relief that the decisions they're making about work that might get signed off, that goes out into the world, ultimately might just become a contender at an award show.

Gives them some confidence in the way that they're talking about it.

And that confidence is like a muscle and the more you use it, the more confident you grow about discussing the creative work.

The second framework is from design powerhouses Ideo and it's their Lifeline cards.

And I love these cards so much.

I feel like they're such a gift to anyone to look through different lenses at any kind of work that you're doing.

They're called Design Lifeline cards, but you can use them for anything and you can use them to help you brief work.

You can assess midway through your work in progress how it's going to or you can evaluate them at the end.

You can also use them as creative triggers.

There's literally nothing that they can't do.

I'm slightly obsessed with them.

I love them.

I'll put a link to them in the show.

Notes.

So the cards offer seven different points of view or questions to frame your creative thinking or critique.

And so the first one is heart and the questions are things like does this work come from a place of empathy?

Does it move people beauty?

Is it elegant, iconic, evocative brains?

Is it clever, strategic, novel bravery?

Did it take risks?

Magic is there or delight?

Mastery?

Does it reflect craft and destiny?

Will it drive long term growth or change?

And so I'm just summarizing the cards here, but they have a whole range of really great questions on and as I say, I really can't recommend them highly enough for really helping you to have great creative conversations, to frame them, to give feedback to somebody that if they're showing you creative work or to think about when you are.

If you're like, we're Talking about today, judging creative work and judging creative campaigns, these are some of the things that you can think about.

As I say, you can use them at the start, middle and end of projects to keep the work on track and the ambition high.

Gemma Moroney from Shook said, the best creative ideas feel they're just slightly out of arm's reach.

And once you see them, they seem obvious, but they weren't obvious to begin with.

That's what makes them magic.

Next up is James Herman's Creative Effectiveness Ladder.

Now this is a framework that's used to understand and improve the effectiveness of your creative marketing campaigns.

And this is a hierarchy of six levels, each representing a different type of effect that the creative marketing can produce, from the least to the most commercially impactful.

And this model is looking at creativity through the lens of results.

And what I love about it is that it really focuses on what the creative idea has to do and gives you ways to evaluate whether it's delivering.

There are six different levels.

The first one is about influencing behavior.

The second is changing perception.

The third is about driving short term sales.

Four is long term growth.

Five is creates cultural impact.

And six is about achieving brand fame.

Let's hear some more from our seasoned creative directors and how they think about the work they create, sell and ultimately evaluate.

Hi, I'm Gemma, I'm one of the co founders of Shook.

We're a creative communications agency.

Yeah, I thought long and hard about this and how I would do it scientifically and using a framework and all that kind of stuff.

But I decided fundamentally I think it does come down to gut feel and it comes down to gut feel when you've done the legwork to know what's right.

So when you've done your research, when you've got an audience insight, and I think that's the most important thing actually for getting to a really good creative idea is having the right good insight that you can use as a jumping off point.

But then once you've got that creative idea, you just feel it's right.

And I think to some extent what you're also looking for is not just that it feels right, but it makes you feel a little bit nervous or sometimes almost even scared that it's got that tension point that you feel really excited about and you feel excited and a little bit nervous to let it out into the world.

I think it is, it's an amalgamation of your experience that you know what's right.

I think there's definitely a place for frameworks and rigor and a process for thinking through how you get to that idea.

And like, one of the things that I've done before, if I'm almost kind of struggling for an idea, is take an idea that you like.

And I think it's a really good exercise actually, just for getting to grips with the mechanics of ideas.

Take an idea that you like and pick it apart backwards and try and work out how they got to that and what are the bits of the idea that make it work.

And it's a really good exercise to understand the mechanics of an idea, but also if you're stuck, to get you unstuck.

But equally, as we all know, sometimes it's, you know, you're standing in line to buy a croissant or you're going for a run or you're in the shower or whatever, and that's actually where the inspiration strikes.

In some ways the worst bit of coming up with ideas is, you know, you've got to do those hours of grunt work to give you all of that stuff to draw upon, that at some point you're going to step away from your, your desk or whatever and that grunt work and it's suddenly going to strike when you least expect it.

Hi, I'm Greg Double.

I'm creative director at Bursin.

I've got formal and informal metrics and informal metrics for some of the soft stuff that everyone knows.

But my, my favorite informal metric is appeared in a WhatsApp group that wasn't full of PR people, which I always think is a great point of talkability and I must admit increasingly did it bang on.

LinkedIn is an annoyingly accurate representation of if it went well, especially from peer to peer representation.

But now I'll, I'll make sure I look at, get my, get my plaudits off our strategy team and say there are more tools than ever before to do PR evaluation well and effectively.

And it's always been our industry's Achilles heel against our marketing disciplines is our ability to manage.

And I think that's where, if I may be a boring LinkedIn person, that's where AI is genuinely useful in creative is we've got a model at Burson called the Fount, which uses like AI to aggregate all sorts of things from tonality to brand perception shift to numbers to eyeballs to genuine influence and networks that have influenced here.

So if a piece of coverage landed here or a social post landed here, you can then see which other social posts are engaged with.

And yeah, but you can dial that up and down with complexity depending on what your clients asked for.

I've got clients who are really data driven and will dive into your numbers and want to see the minutiae of impact going around and I've got clients who I would say are more what I'd call like look and feel evaluators on did it still hit those metrics like reach?

Did it get people talking and getting.

But I think it's.

I said that I'm excited about AI and creativity for everything except for the creative and everything that comes before the creative idea and everything that comes after the creative idea.

I think it's brilliant.

It's the making of what I think human still roles can play.

So there you have it.

Three brilliant frameworks and a bunch of hard won wisdom and insights to help you to evaluate your own and others creative work.

We looked at the Heineken Creative Ladder for Ambition with Hack Ideos lifeline cards looking at depth and humanity and how you can use those at the beginning, the middle or the end of your creative process.

And James Herman's Ladder for Effectiveness which we just scraped the surface of.

It's a really great resource.

We also had straight from the trenches wisdom from our creative directors and some of the things that really landed for me were know it when you see it, but learn how to see it.

I thought that was really powerful.

Keep your ideas simple, sharp and rooted in truth and if you can articulate in a sentence then you know you're probably onto something.

Evaluate with clarity and not just your opinion and make sure the idea has a clear why and is rooted in strategy and authenticity.

I love being asked to get involved in judging awards because I'm a learn it all if you didn't know already.

And I learn something every single time.

I'm really grateful to be asked and I totally immerse myself into it.

I was on a PR jury a few years ago and an idea that had been shortlisted for a Gong just really jarred with me.

Everything about it jarred with me.

I didn't like the initial idea, I didn't like the execution, I didn't like the way that was perpetuating certain stereotypes as I saw it.

And I loved the brand, but I just felt that it could have done a million other things that might have been more progressive.

And that's when I really had to challenge my own thinking and go and have a real word with myself, talk myself down, reread the entry over and over again and really think about applying some of these frameworks that I've been talking about and other things that were helping me to be much more objective, that weren't about my own gut, weren't about my own feelings, but were about how to try to take my biases out of it.

Now, of course, everything we've been talking about, it's not easy.

It's that wonderful combination of imagination and maths.

It's your head, it's your heart, it's your gut.

But all of this is something that you can practice and you can develop.

I'm going to give the Creative Moment judges the last word on what they're looking for from the entries that they see in the upcoming competition.

Another thing that I've talked about a lot is you've got to really fall in love with the idea.

So, you know, when you're writing an award entry, why are the judges going to fall in love with this idea?

You know, they don't want to know that you worked really hard at it or whatever.

They want to fall in love with the creative idea, I think, first and foremost.

And it, you know, it stays with them.

After they've been working through all of those entries, They've put the 30 entries to the side on their desk and they can't stop thinking about your idea.

Of course, I am also looking for, you know, was it on brief, Was it on brand?

Did it make sense to the audience?

Was it effective?

But certainly with the Creative Moment Awards, I think it's the Creative Moment Awards.

And therefore is that creative idea that you're really looking for.

I will start by saying whatever is on the entry guidelines because they are really important.

But more broadly, if you're unlucky enough to have me judging your category, I've got a few idiosyncrasities that I always like, I always.

I always will rate higher than others.

And that's.

The first one is treating the boxes you get given on an award entry as a storytelling guide, not a storytelling storytelling box.

So feel free to ignore some of the categories word for word.

If they perfectly match up, tell your story first.

And I think that's really important.

And within that, show some personality.

Like, you're not being judged by independent third parties from a that have been selected from other industries.

You are being judged by your peers who know the score.

So don't bullshit, but do show some truth.

And it's like if there was a part of the campaign that you wish had gone better, like, say it.

Or if it's the part of it that you think would have felt really challenging and you found your way around it, say if.

Like, it You, I don't think people never underestimate the bird.

The reading burden of judges, like, start getting to the point of the one thing I will say which perhaps reveals more about me as a judge than an entry.

I think like, when you're the 9th and 10th award entry on the list, it hurts you.

Yeah.

Unless you've really designed it super well, you've written it in a really engaging way.

And so I think so as a follow up, I think the second point is design matters.

And that's just, it's just human biases.

It's like if you get a block of text versus a picture that's broken up, a block of text, you're gonna engage with it a little bit more readily.

It's called the creative moments.

Be creative.

With your award.

Your work was creative, so be creative.

I'm looking for that kind mindset.

Like, it actually has surpassed what kind of we would about 10, 15, 20 years ago would see a success.

Like, we've landed the Daily Mail.

Like, what are the things that really made the creative kind of stand out?

On socials, in WhatsApp groups, in traditional papers, kind of like your blogs, all of that kind of stuff.

Like, what impact have we had just outside of traditional pr?

I think that's the kind of stuff that I think is quite powerful because I think that's what shows reach and shows that it actually has penetrated spaces outside of like what we have, like would know on average.

I'm also looking for, like I said, that really strong kind of insight that led to really strong creative because I think that spark is always just a really nice kind of way to describe a creative, to speak to the strength of why it stands up in time.

I think creative has its place when it's just random kind of burst, but I always do love that kind of like insight driven strategy kind of thought out work where it feels like it, it has purpose and reason to be exactly where it is and the idea behind it.

If you'd like a handy summary of what I've talked about today, head to the Show Notes and download your free worksheet.

And as always, if you found this useful, please share it with a fellow creative.

Until next time, keep creating and pushing for great work.

Now Go Create.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Now Go Create.

I hope you enjoyed the conversation on how to upskill and unleash your creativity at work.

Check out the free downloadable worksheet for this episode on my website, nowgocreate.co.uk and if you like the episode, please be sure to subscribe to our show and follow us on social media.

Now go create.

Now go create.