The 2013 Rockies

The winning Venetian mask design at the 2013 Rockie Awards. Concept and artwork courtesy of DC’s Cale Cathey

It’s easy to dismiss creative awards. On the surface they appear to be an example of an industry largely self-congratulating itself. But here’s the interesting thing about awards: the work that actually wins has a higher likelihood of delivering business results than the work that falls short.

There’s some research behind this.

Every year Leo Burnett evaluates all the global Cannes Lion winners on whether the awarded work achieved its intended business objectives in the marketplace. They cite an 86 percent correlation between award-winning work and its business effectiveness.

This aligns with an IPA Databank/Nielsen study. The organizations studied share-of-voice (SOV) spending and found that increases in SOV can lead to market share growth of .5 percent per every 10 percentage point of excess SOV spent. But whenever a creatively-awarded campaign was evaluated against the same metric it generated 11 times more share of growth per every 10 points of excess share-of-voice.

Examples like this sound right to us.

Drake Cooper believes that effective creative work leads to effective business results. So every year when the Rockies come around we get excited to compete with our peers and see all the great work from the year prior.

This year’s show was unique as it was in the form of a cocktail hour with the winning work displayed like an art gallery. Which is a nice format for the evening because you get to spend time with everyone doing the work from across the industry while celebrating great creative thinking. Those are the two most important things. Our friend Tom Donahoe said “I hope we never let the work become more important than the people who create it.”

Drake Cooper, along with our amazing clients, was fortunate to win 14 Gold and Silver honors spanning Website Design, Identity, TV, Print, Radio, Direct Marketing, Collateral and Complete Campaign. We always share these awards equally with our clients because in this business healthy collaboration always wins the top honors.

See the full list of winners here and congratulations to everyone who took home awards.