5 tips that will help you win all the awards

GC has never won any awards.

Here are my excuses:

• Youth. Although there are a few 28 year olds out there with more metal hanging around than a professional body-piercer's passive-aggressive co-dependent girlfriend-slash-assistant, the golden window for award winning tends to be 28-38.
• Certain sociopathic tendencies mean I never end up working anywhere longer than a year, which means I'm usually a freelancer, so I never get to work on the big campaigns that people win awards for cause they tend to go to the lifers.
• Time wasted clambering up through the successive layers of advertising: CRM, DM, mobile and web so that despite now having been in the industry, sort of, since 2004, I've only been in above the line for two years. Below the line awards don't really count anyway do they? Not that I've won loads of them or anything either.
• Blah, blah, blah.
• I'm certain anonymous commentators will waste no time at all bravely pointing out the hard truth about the real reason why I haven't won any awards, so I'll just say in advance, thanks, and you are right, but have you ever noticed how people don't often choose to spend time with you?

As someone who makes something of a USP out of being utterly shameless, I have to do a lot of squirmy self-justification before I admit to my inadequacy in the fake gold baubles department don't I?

Even otherwise clear-sighted people cannot resist their siren call. You, for example, are probably only still reading because you're waiting for the 5 tips that will help you win awards.

Once you've got a few awards, you're allowed to become dismissive of the whole overblown fandango. It's a simple economy of scarcity and value. Scamp, I believe, sits under a shelf, that, even to the untrained eye, constitutes a major health and safety risk. At DDB I believe they use them as door stops. Tony Davidson is in the process of constructing a 1:1 scale model of Westminster Abbey with his. I shit you not.

Now I don't know, but I reckon advertising has more awards systems than any other industry out there. So I just wanted to ask: what's with all the awards chaps?

Why do we have this constant need for self-congratulation?

Why does the industry have to spend so much time, and money, slapping itself heartily on the back in this disgusting way?

Is it because, deep down inside even the most jaded, saurine, adman is a idealistic child who believes that really advertising is evil? A child who needs to be consoled with praise and shiny objects just so he'll shut up for five minutes so you can get on with earning money to buy the ungrateful wretch trainers, graphic novels and expensive 45 rpm records for fuck's sake?

Is it because the people we make our product for, the public, don't actually like our product?

It's just that a person who seeks gratification, and can't find it in the world outside himself, and instead resorts to a fantasy world of praise and self-gratification based on his own set of mysterious criteria would be, not just deluded, but also in all likelihood, a really furious masturbator.