Judging work on its Creative merit sounds simple. If the work jumps out at you, grabs you by the nuts and makes you wish you could steal it for your book, it’s good, right?

Pack a room with various opinionated Creatives and a selection of Suits who clearly have an ‘interesting’ history together, add a huge pile of awards’ boards and it gets a bit more complicated. Throw in a revolutionary, Olympic-style voting system and, well… It was emotional.

This year the most populated category was ‘Campaigns’. There were lots of entries, all boasting an integrated combo of TV, press, DM, experiential and, of course, websites. Websites crammed with user-generated webisodes were definitely flavour of the year. (Does anyone other than the agency making them actually watch these things?) Some were good, others very good and some even deserved metal.

Last year ‘Dimensional Mail’ was pretty thin on the ground, so a lot of people thought entering big, expensive boxes would be a sure thing this year. But big isn’t necessarily clever. Or a shoo-in.

Poor old traditional DM was woefully under-represented, and, I am saddened to report, even those letters that turned up were pretty average.

‘Radio’ got one entry. Will it get Gold? Under the new system it should, but this threw up a huge bone of contention. All that really good, well-executed, brilliantly thought-out integrated work that couldn’t even get near the podium in ‘Campaigns’ would probably feel a bit hard done by if it did. A few sparks flew. (And a letter from the Judges was sent to the board of ADMA to suggest not using the revolutionary new Olympic-style voting system.)

Overall the quality of work was pretty good, but the general consensus among the Judges was “could do better”. There were a couple of stand-out ‘Campaigns’, a few really beautifully crafted pieces and, in my humble opinion, one example of nut-grabbing marvellous-ness that you might see sneaking its way into my book if ever I was looking for another job.

Of course, I had to abstain from voting for – or debating the obvious merits of – the fantastic work MercerBell entered, but that hasn’t stopped us racking up an impressive 5 finalists in this year’s ADMA Awards. Which is a damn fine showing, and one of which we should all be ecstatically proud. I know I am.

P.S. Having recovered from the obligatory post-Awards’ Night hangover, I can report that we walked away with just the one crystal trophy, a Bronze for MasterCard Priceless Music CRM program. Given the scarcity of Silvers and Golds given out on the night, this was actually a pretty good result – and everyone who went had a cracking night.