What Makes Award-Winning Writing?

Last week saw the global creative industry descend on London for the D&AD Awards - one of these international attendees being Mia Rafowitz, creative director at Droga5. As the copywriting half of her creative duo with long-time art director partner Cara Cecchini, Mia was in town to judge the Writing for Advertising category at the awards show, and soak in the inspiration to be found across the festival.

The Writing for Advertising jury, led by Uncommon’s Nil Leonard and Dentsu Creative South Africa’s Nkanyezi Masango, was tasked with judging across eight sub-categories, evaluating the craft of copy in film projects, print, social, outdoor and more.

Speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway, Mia shares her first-ever in-person jury room experience came with some initial imposter syndrome worries, before she eased in and felt welcomed by her incredibly esteemed and diverse fellow jurors. Speaking to the international mix of talent alongside her, she says it provided a useful realisation: “Taste is taste.”

And though she was happy to have Londoners in the room providing cultural nuance to the local projects, the varied perspectives meant that no agendas or egos took over discussions. “There was healthy debate,” she says. “When you're a young creative, you're enamoured by awards, and then as you move forward, you get a little jaded and people talk about the politics behind them. I felt like this was such an example of zero politics, no ego… They just came to respect the work.”

Above: Mia Rafowitz

“You want to be in a room where you're not the best creative,” Mia adds, describing how she felt “armed with excellent creatives’ brains” during judging. “It’s a really demanding industry, but ultimately it all felt worth it to be in that room.”

She continues, “And I met great people! Like [New Commercial Arts creative director] Loriley Sessions, who basically has had a partner for the same kind of time as Cara and I, so there were just a lot of similarities. That was very cool - there are very few female teams that I’ve met who last as long as we have. So you make friends with smart people from across the world - I just think everyone should always take the opportunity to be on a jury if they can. It's nerve-wracking, and we all have imposter syndrome, but you deserve to be there if you're asked!”

Mia and the jury shortlisted 20 projects from around 200 entries, but didn’t award any projects the top prize: the Black Pencil. This responsibility falls on the jury presidents, who take recommendations from the jury, but ultimately decide which pieces are Black Pencil-worthy.

Discussing what elevates work from the Yellow Pencil to the Black level, Mia says, “I think you just have to feel it. And I just don't think it was there. It’s very difficult to win a Black Pencil. Being in that room and seeing how hard it is… Most of the day was spent choosing that shortlist, and that was not easy. I think people should be really proud!”

So, if taste truly transcends boundaries as Mia suggests, what were some of the elements of writing that the jury was looking for? For Mia, it’s the combination of a powerful insight and a strong copy construct that acts as the backbone of the work. “Then you pair that with nuanced writing that feels lived,” she says. 

An example she gives is GIRLvsCANCER’s ‘Sex & Cancer’ campaign, which won a Wood Pencil in the film subcategory and was shortlisted for outdoor. “It’s such pure writing. It's just women talking to camera - and it was all written and consulted in the cancer community. So it has such stopping power. My favourite line is: ‘Betrayed by my own tits’. It’s a taboo, and a powerful insight.” 

She continues, “It’s super important, because we rarely are just focused on letting women speak, and speak about pleasure. Someone recently said to me that people hate watching women suffer. And I think people hate even more watching women be empowered. So often, we see work that focuses on vulnerability and feeling sorry for people, so to flip that and allow this empowered ‘fuck you’ attitude to be front and centre in a speaking-to-camera film was very powerful.”

Another Yellow Pencil-winning example is The Harris Project’s ‘You Don’t Know the Half of It’ campaign that used the familiar ‘never have I ever’ drinking game as the influence for a moving film around co-occurring substance abuse and mental health disorders.

“We saw a lot of work that tried to do that, where you have that [existing] construct. But the writing in that… It was like the slowest rug-pull that I've seen, and done so beautifully and powerfully. When we all watched it, immediately I knew it was the best piece I'd seen this year, writing-wise. We were really blown away by it.”

The jury also wanted to balance the heavier projects with more comedic writing, awarding the Wood Pencil to Macpac’s ‘Weather Anything’ work - a “purely funny” kiwi film for outdoor clothing that provides a real cliff-hanger, if you excuse the pun. “That's got a disarming sense of humour which I feel you rarely see in the states,” says Mia. “Every single piece of dialogue was so well written, and so purposeful, funny and a breath of fresh air.”

Mia’s own agency, Droga5, was also awarded a Yellow Pencil for writing - although she was out of the room for those discussions. The New York Times’ ‘More of Life Brought to Life’ campaign used copy in a unique stream of consciousness, grounding the writing in a truth about the product. “Then you have the added elements of the New York Times games, and cooking and all of this stuff,” she says. “They were able to pull that off and still make something that has so much impact and is so beautifully crafted, like that team always does.” 

Because of the different mediums being evaluated in each subcategory, Mia says the jury had to centre largely around one translatable thing - whether the project’s writing had “stopping power”. Thus, a significant challenge was having to separate the written elements from the art direction and other aspects of the project to determine this factor. “It's hard. We had to do it through the lens of: is the writing what makes it? And is it additive? Or is it something that's taking away [from the work]? There were a few examples where holistically the campaign was so great, but we realised that it was the visuals that were driving it a bit more - or the copy wasn't the thing that makes it that incredible.”

Asked about projects with ‘stopping power’, Mia highlights three out of home campaigns that were awarded in particular; the aforementioned GIRLvsCANCER work, Uncommon’s ‘The Drag Defence Fund’ for RuPaul’s 'Werq the World Tour', and Innocean Berlin’s ‘Capa vs War’ project. Speaking on the latter, Mia says that a creative on the project told her they were asked to take it down. “Which I think is the standard,” she jokes, “if your work doesn't make anyone mad, it's not impacting anyone, right? Obviously, you want it to be in the correct ways, but I think if people aren't saying anything, it's worse. It’s good to take a chance, but it's high risk, high reward.”

One of these projects that caused discourse in the mainstream media and adland alike was awarded a Graphite Pencil by the jury for its writing - Ogilvy UK’s campaign for the Mayor of London, ‘Maaate’.

“We had a lot of discussions about it. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to just distil everything down into one word - and that's what ‘Maaate’ does.” Responding to the criticism the campaign received at the time for being reductive or ‘feeble’, Mia says that she believes it’s a useful tool. “It's a flip of something that you say every day that turns it into a way to actually stop something. So I kind of disagree with the reductive bit. It's more so ‘let's use words as a way to actually change behaviours’ and puts the onus finally on men to do it, not women. So that was interesting!”

Now that the D&AD festival is over, Mia returns to New York with her new jury room experience and learnings in hand. Taking a glimpse into how other creatives evaluate work, as well as seeing writing beyond her favoured long-form style succeed at the show - such as British Airways’ ‘A British Original’ OOH work - is sure to influence her own creative process back at Droga5. 

Excited to go back and continue making “a bunch of very cool work”, Mia says, “It’s easy to get down on advertising because it can be a grind, and it's tough. And people who really care about it, really put their hearts into it. So when you get people together who really are passionate and care, it's really exciting.”

Sharing that writers often don’t have the breadth of inspiring resources and references that art directors have, she reflects that awards shows like D&AD - whether as a juror or as a young creative attending the show and looking at the winners online - provide a useful fount of knowledge to learn about what makes great, award-winning writing. “To be there live and see it was really cool. I’m tired now, but I am reinvigorated after - reinvigorated for what's to come!”