I’ve mentioned the problem of measurement before – how the mobile marketing and advertising industry is struggling because there isn’t a standard way of measuring performance, and how lack of a standardized measure makes it difficult to show the results of marketing efforts in this arena. It is difficult to convince brands to take a risk with mobile if there is no standard way to measure whether or not the portion of a campaign has been a success.
In other areas, too, measurement is important, and yet, sometimes, there isn’t always a way to directly measure what needs to be looked at – and that’s where awards come in. Some people believe that awards are all about glitz and glamour, about the ceremony itself. To be sure, there is some prestige attached to winning an award, and it is nice to have a night where we pay special attention to those people who have won an award.
But awards also fulfill a more important function. Properly implemented, they offer an opportunity for each and every company within an industry to field their best work, and put it up for scrutiny by a panel of their peers. It pits the best of the industry against one another, in a competition in which there aren’t really losers, but where the winners can be adequately recognized for their efforts. It allows the quality of work to be judged on slightly different criteria, not merely in terms of market success or failure (although that plays a role) but also against measures of creativity and innovation.
Creativity and innovation, those hard-to-measure intangible qualities, are the hallmarks of the truly great. That is why the Mobile Marketing Association organizes the MMA Awards every year. These are traits that cannot be objectively measured, and it’s only by comparison against others in the industry that we can know which are the most creative, most original, most special ideas and implementations of mobile marketing and advertising.
The MMA Awards 2010 will also be a good chance to see the work that others are doing, and while that cannot be measured, it can provide inspiration and a mental benchmark for future projects. There are many reasons why the MMA Awards are a good idea, but winning is the only way to demonstrate what would otherwise be immeasurable.
Submissions are open now, and you can read more at http://mmaglobal.com/awards.