DMA Awards â data driven direction for award winning submissions

We’re just a week away from September 17th’s deadline for handing in your DMA Awards entry. You likely already know the three areas the judges focus on – creativity, strategy and results. You’ve thought about your most engaging campaign. The one that propelled your target audience down their buying path. The one that snapped all your stretch targets.

Have you put the same amount of thought into how you craft your entry? In many ways, Bananarama said it all in ‘82: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it…that’s what gets results”.

But what is the way that you do it? And is there anything in the way that gold winners do it, that’s different to everyone else?

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it

I took a look through all of the winners in one DMA Award category, and at some Gold Winners across categories. Not content to rely on my judge’s instincts alone, I enlisted IBM’s Watson and ran the submissions through the Watson Tone Analyzer to see if there were any clues on what makes for winning entries. There were some interesting trends.

In a mellow tone, feeling fancy free

What we say day-to-day reflects who we are, how we feel and how we think. It also shows up in what we put into DMA Award entries. Psycholinguists have studied these connections for years, and it’s now possible to take some text and get some insights into the thinking and feeling behind it.

There are three dimensions:
1. Emotion - anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness
2. Language style – analytical, confident, tentative
3. Social tendencies – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, emotional range.

There’s lots of statistics and psychological models behind these three dimensions. If you love the detail, here’s where you can read about the science behind the service. If you’re willing to dive right in – here’s what the ‘scores on the doors’ said.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

Across both the Award Category and Gold Winning dimensions, the strongest emotion was joy and the weakest was disgust. This is probably what you’d expect. We’re talking about great campaigns with engaged audiences that deliver amazing results – good news all round. That speaks nicely to the ‘creativity’ view that the judges take.

Thinking about the ‘results’ view, it’s no surprise that ‘analytical’ stands out across both Award Category and Gold Winning dimensions, as the prominent style. It’s in the social measures that the gold winners have some stand-out trends, not seen in the other entries.

I get so emotional baby

The social tone is based on ‘the big 5’ personality dimensions – sometimes called ‘OCEAN’ – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Some models refer to neuroticism as ‘emotional range’ and it’s the dimension that the gold winners all scored highest on. Larger scores here reflect higher emotional responses – both low, and high. Gold Winners are more highly emotionally responsive than other entrants.

Gold Winners also scored higher than the other entrants on conscientiousness. Higher scores here reflect thoughtfulness and a likeliness to achieve high levels of success through purposeful planning and persistence. Does that sound like the strategy lens that the DMA Judges use?

Gold, always believe in your soul, you’ve got the power to know

In summary, here’s the direction the data suggests you head for an award winning submission:

1. Win hearts – tell the judges how you made your audience feel, and don’t skimp on the emotions.
2. Win minds – like the best maths test results, show your working, not just the result. Let the judges know what you were thinking behind the campaign, and how you realised it.
3. Good news in the numbers – remember that joy was the overriding emotion in the winning entries, backed up by some solid numbers. Balance the two and you’re on the way to a winning entry.

Here’s where you can find out some more – and good luck, I’ll be looking forward to seeing your entries.

Try out Watson Tone Analyzer
See the 2016 DMA Award Winners
Enter the 2017 DMA Awards