How to write award-winning words
Awards – we've won them, judged them, sworn at them – now here are our secrets for writing a winning entry
Terry O’Neill’s morning-after shot of Best Actress Faye Dunaway, 1977
Well, that was the Academy Awards, 2021. The Best Actress howled like a wolf. The Best Actor stood in a field in Wales and looked a bit bemused. Everyone else had the COVID look about them. You know the one – er – not sure do we do this now?
The actual submission forms to win an Oscar are pretty dry affairs. The fun begins when the movie companies reach out to voters with ads titled ‘For Your Consideration’ – jazzed-up pleas for the Academy members to share their humble view that the picture in question may just be about the finest cinematic achievement since Citizen Kane.
Awards matter to more and more people. That’s because there are more and more awards. Some organisations – publishers, hospitality venues – make tons of money from them. It’s one of the few media growth industries.
So how do you win one? Most of us can’t afford ‘For Your Consideration’ campaigns. Success and failure depends on the entry forms you send in alongside your precious work. That work should speak for itself, of course. But who’s listening? That’s where Persuasion comes in.
A message of sympathy and support for the UK public relations industry
PRs – our thoughts are with you at this difficult time. You have until 20 May to send you form off for your annual version of the Oscars. You’ve got lots to say: a real chance of winning. Now you just have to write the thing…
Writing awards entries has become an important new requirement in the business writer’s job description.
I've entered and judged more awards than I care to remember. I’ve won a couple, as editor and writer, and I suppose that makes up for the hours of peculiar stress that went into writing and designing the submission.
And it is a peculiar stress for a writer. There are two characters jostling in your brain for supremacy. One is the Deserving Soul, talented, dedicated, but somehow humble with it. The other is the Smug, Self-Satisfied Bore.
Here are some tips about writing to win based on awards workshops we’ve run in the past. This advice comes as much from the judge’s than the entrant’s point of view. There is a simple equation with judging awards. Satisfaction at being considered an industry expert divided by The agony of ploughing through 900 forms written by Smug, Self-Satisfied Bores. This is from the heart.
Grab ’em straight away
It’s like meeting an interview candidate or a potential client in a lift: you have seconds to make an impression.
Here’s how most awards submissions sound:
‘Ahem….er….I have been asked here today to address you on the subject of….um….and unaccustomed as I am…ahem’....’
Instead of being a nervous speaker at the local Rotary Club event, think of yourself as a director of a James Bond movie. Let’s get some action upfront. What’s really motivating this entry – the stand-out thing about your work?
Where’s the jeopardy?
A lot of awards entries are like trying to eat a sticky toffee pudding with a tiramisu on top: just too sickly-sweet for consumption. Everything about the project and everyone who worked on it is just too wonderful for words (but we're going to write them anyway) – and so it has been since Day One.
I don’t know many projects like that. Far better to start with a challenge, the harder the better, and show how you overcame it. Better still if there have been bumps and false starts along the way. Show that you've learned something. We can all sympathise with that, and once you have the judge’s sympathy you can begin to dream of that precious, life-defining moment when you step on stage to be handed a plastic obelisk by someone who once appeared on a late-night comedy quiz show.
The Turning Point
In every successful creative process, there’s a moment when you get it. It might take a few arguments to get whatever it is. But lots of us forced to read an awards entry hope against hope that the Archimedes-in-the-bath moment will be in there, somewhere. It’s the X factor that gives you The Why Factor – why you went on to do what you did and how everything fell into place.
The agency hated it when Archie had one of his bright ideas…
If you read one thing….
Judges are conscientious types – at first. By the 39th entry form, they are sustained only by liquid stimulants and the conviction that unless they give each entry no more than two minutes they will go insane. So be really tough on yourself. There is one thing that makes your work stand out: only one. What is it?
The evidence and the stats follow, not lead
Let’s hope you have got some unimpeachable and unimprovable figures to back up your case. If not, you may need more of a ‘narrative’ – by which I mean more emotion, more drama, more turning points and breakthroughs.
But the stats should come out of that narrative, not lead it. Your work is the cause, the results the effect.
Good luck. And for heaven’s sake, get the form proof-read properly.
Want help with your 2021 awards effort? Forthwrite is running online workshops on how to write killer submissions. Contact us at hello@forthwrite.co.uk or +44 7721 956 844.
We thought we were the best – so how come we weren’t even in the top 10?
David Kean writes: There is another type of accolade which companies like to stick up in their reception and put in their credentials – league tables.
But being the Most Improved Independent Mergers and Acquisitions Boutique Consultancy Specialising in Industrial Aggregates in the Mid-Market Cap Sector – Scandinavia region as voted by the readers of Sharp Sand & Aggregates Today doesn’t quite have the heft of being in the top three of the Financial Times 2021 UK’s Leading Management Consultants league table. Obviously, it’s nice to be mentioned, but if you want to impress, focus on the big one.
Many firms are too busy being busy to go to the trouble of working out how the league table is compiled. They just assume it is an unimpeachably fair process where all contenders compete on an even playing field. But any company worth its salt has no interest playing on an even pitch.
League tables are not subject to the rigour or scrutiny of the Electoral Commission. You can often make your own luck –plan your campaign cleverly to skew the result your way.
Here’s how it works. In the UK advertising industry, one of the most important barometers of agencies’ performance was the Marketing Week Agency Reputation Survey. It was important because it canvassed clients for their impressions of advertising agencies. As clients are the constituency the agencies most want to impress – even more so than their peers – this survey received a lot of attention.
Every year, when it came out, in agency boardrooms all over the country, there would be Champagne uncorked or the wringing of hands, depending on where the agency concerned had ended up in the new survey.
In the agency where I worked, we had been languishing every year just outside the top 10. We couldn’t work out why. It was very irritating. We swept the board with all the other industry accolades, dominated the awards season and were commercially very successful. But this most important of surveys consistently marked us down.
Being a research-based agency, we put our brains trust to work on the problem. We studied the methodology, the sample sizes, the format. And, most importantly, we found out the time period when the research fieldwork was conducted. Once we knew that, we carpet-bombed the client community in the six-week period of the fieldwork with lots of interesting material designed to raise our salience.
The best agency overall was the one which had the highest scores averaged out in each of the categories surveyed. So we targeted the client community with packages, mailers, books and funny little novelties which reinforced the specific story we were trying to tell. For strategy and effectiveness, they received published books of our award winning effectiveness case studies. To show off our creative work it was packaged as the card game Top Trumps. You get the idea.
When the bombardment ended and the new survey came out, we had moved from 11th to second place – and were first place in creativity and strategy. We were now officially ‘hot’. But all we had really done was use our brains and exercise a bit of chutzpah.
Nothing ‘simple’ about it, Tina
Songs for writers
Love is a Losing Game Amy Winehouse
Asif Kapadia’s film Amy is a tough, but necessary watch for anyone interested in the creative process. It’s a documentary about the life and death of the singer Amy Winehouse.
The hardest scene is the party in London which Amy’s friends organise to watch the Grammy awards. Her album, Back to Black, wins best vocal performance.
There are two poignant moments. One: Amy really couldn’t care less – she’s off drugs for the moment, and anything, even winning the biggest award in the music business, is boring without drugs. Two: she’s also bored with the album. It’s done, finished, yesterday. That’s the mark of the true creator. But she is too far gone to manage a follow-up. So throughout her remaining years she’s doomed to keep playing a masterpiece that bores her.
She performed this song live with Prince. George Michael chose it as his favourite record on Desert Island Discs. She’d have swapped all that, and the Grammy, just to go on making interesting music.
Let’s end with an anonymous quote
The importance of an industry is in inverse proportion to the number of awards it gives itself.
Say this to yourself when a crooked, undeserving jury-nobbling lightweight triumphs over you in a clearly flawed, corrupt and borderline criminal selection process.
It’s true, though, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t get ‘Top International Spy (Saving More Than 10,000 Lives category)’, do you?