Episode 37: Mark Denton saves The Creative Circle. - a podcast by Dave DYE

Should Liverpool win the Carabao Cup this season I’m sure they’ll be happy.
But it’ll be a bonus.
Their goal is to win the Premier League.
Or maybe the European Cup.
Creatives used to view Creative Circle Awards in the same way; delighted to win one, but their eyes were fixed on D&AD.
Or BTAA.
Or Campaign Press.
Or Campaign Posters.
Or The One Show.
Or, a bit later, Cannes.
In fact, my first ever advertising award was a Creative Circle Gold for radio - great, but I’d happily have swapped it for an ‘in book’ at D&AD.
But, they did have one thing going for them - their annual.
It wasn’t like the other annuals.
The idiosyncratic way that they chose juries meant they featured an equally idiosyncratic batch of ads.
One year they decided a single person should judge a whole category. (The year I won my gold for radio, fortunately the judge was Derek Day, arguably the most astute judge of radio on the planet. Thanks Derek!)
Another year they decided that all judges had to be under thirty.
They managed to rid the juries of those pesky award winners and Creative Directors, but to be fair, it again guaranteed that annual had different work in it than those other annuals.
So it was worth a look.
By 2006, with entries down, they could no longer afford to print an annual.
As a registered charity, they only exist is to shine a light on the best British advertising has to offer, without an annual that light is going to be significantly dimmed.
So why would agencies, who have finite awards budgets, continue to enter?
It was a difficult question.
What to do?
What to do?
A bald man with a twiddly moustache walks into frame ‘Ere, I’ll have a go…let me run it!’

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