Louise McQuat’s LIA Diary #3: The magic you can’t put on a scorecard
Louise McQuat, Global ECD, Akcelo, represented Australia on the Digital and Creators & Social Platforms jury at LIA in Vegas. Here, McQuat wraps up three days of judging, reporting exclusively for Campaign Brief along with most of the other Australian and New Zealand jurors.
Three days, hundreds of case studies, and a spectacular amount of Vegas sunshine happening outside while we debated inside. We’re done.
There’s work you like for reasons you can explain. Then there’s work that has a bit of magic you can’t quite put your finger on. Every creative spends years nurturing a feel for it. Turns out “I can’t quite explain it, but fuck it’s good” is a difficult thing to put on a scorecard.
And we’d spent the previous two days being very thorough about the scorecard. Judging Digital and Social & Creator meant dissecting every idea. How neatly did it tick the criteria boxes? If it was in retail, how much stuff did they actually sell? If it was community management, how much managing did the community manager actually do?
There was plenty of smart work. It met the criteria. It had great results. We could explain exactly why it deserved to be in the conversation.
But once we got to the metal conversations, there was room to step back from the mechanics and think about the experience. Someone enjoyed this. They got something out of interacting with it. The idea gave them a reason to care. And that was part of what made it worth celebrating.
As we debated silver, gold and the Grand Prix, the conversation became more about the ideas we loved. The ones we walked out of the room still thinking about.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a clever solution. But in three months, will I remember it? Or will it have been a piece of work that made perfect sense for the category it was submitted to?
What struck me was how much broader the questions became when we got to the highest honours. How exceptional is this as digital creativity? What does it achieve in social and creator? We were looking at the whole idea, how everything fitted together, and how it made us feel.
We all know that feeling when an idea is right. The insight, the execution, the craft. We’ve pulled it apart, questioned it, looked for the gaps, and there’s nothing we’d want to change. Which, for a room full of creative people, is saying something.
That’s where creative instinct has to count for something. Especially after we’ve spent three days giving it a very thorough interrogation.
We could explain why plenty of ideas worked.
The best ones reminded us why we love doing this in the first place.
Read Louise’s first diary here
Read Louise’s second diary here
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