Grey London’s President on How Judging “Widens the Aperture”
For the past few days, Las Vegas’ Encore hotel has been abuzz with some of the most exciting minds in creativity coming together for the London International Awards. Some of the winners have already been announced, but debate rages on today in the many remaining categories.
Two categories that just wrapped up their jury duties are Creative Strategy and Transformative Business Impact. The former recognizes the digging, investigation, creative problem solving and discovery that leads into and inspires the creative idea; the latter doesn’t just recognize work that promotes solutions to customers; it recognizes the solutions themselves.
On the jury for those categories at LIA 2024 is Conrad Persons, Grey London president who counts strategist as one of the several impressive hats he’s worn in his career. Having spent a morning in statue deliberations in front of an audience of some of this year’s Creative LIAisons cohort, LBB’s Alex Reeves found Conrad during his lunch break to discuss the LIA jury experience.
LBB> What makes the process of judging LIA so special for you?
Conrad> Everything's done together, everything's on site, and I think that there is a level of commitment, depth and dialog to it that I just really like. None of the conversations feel passive. There's this kind of active deconstruction of the work and excitement that I think is fantastic.
In a nutshell, there's something about being locked in a room in the desert looking at each piece of work with a critical eye around people that you really respect that kind of brings you closer together as a jury. It also brings you closer to the work. You're kind of living in this bubble of creativity for a few days. It feels pretty unique.
LBB> You’ve been discussing work in the Creative Strategy and Transformative Business Impact jury today. What is important to you about those categories?
LBB> You’ve been discussing work in the Creative Strategy and Transformative Business Impact jury today. What is important to you about those categories?
Conrad> What I like is that it's got a bit of subjectivity and a bit of objectivity. Anything that has an aspect of creativity has a bit of subjectivity to it, but when you're talking about strategy, when you're talking about transformation, there are metrics and outcomes that feel really tangible as well. If it's just one or the other, I sometimes find it frustrating, but this is the best of both worlds.
LBB> Of course at LIA there's another unique aspect of the Creative LIAisons mentees witnessing this level of discussion while you discuss statues. How does that change things?
Conrad> What I like is that it's got a bit of subjectivity and a bit of objectivity. Anything that has an aspect of creativity has a bit of subjectivity to it, but when you're talking about strategy, when you're talking about transformation, there are metrics and outcomes that feel really tangible as well. If it's just one or the other, I sometimes find it frustrating, but this is the best of both worlds.
LBB> Of course at LIA there's another unique aspect of the Creative LIAisons mentees witnessing this level of discussion while you discuss statues. How does that change things?
Conrad> The presence of all these intellectually curious, energetic people is probably the best thing about this award show. I have learned more from them than they'll ever learn from me, and just seeing how they see the work in this category through their eyes is totally fascinating.
LBB> More generally, what does judging work at a show like this do for you?
Conrad> It does a couple of things. It widens the aperture, because you're seeing work that may never be seen in your home market or in the clients that you serve or in the categories you work in. It makes you look at work slightly differently as you kind of diagnose it and parse it in a way that you might not otherwise. It pushes you, makes you realise how high the bar is to get good work done. And then I think it also really underlines the fact that it's very difficult to do what we do, and any piece of work that is done in half measures is doomed to failure, because as different as all of this work is, all of the successful work shows people going all in on an idea.
I fear sometimes that we don't watch enough work in the industry. I can't think of how many times I've been to Cannes and found an empty Palais or talked to someone who's been there for four or five days at an award show and hasn't actually seen any work. So just sitting and immersing yourself in the work, it shouldn't feel like a luxury, but for many people it sometimes is.
