There is a moment every B2B marketer recognises.
The email arrives.
“Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…”
You have not submitted anything yet.
You have not paid the entry fee.
But somehow, you are already excellent.
I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and won awards for services we did not even provide. I blocked them.
The song I wrote, Table for Ten, exaggerates it for effect, but the system it is mocking is very, very real.
Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded. Industry bodies, publishers, agencies, consultancies, and “communities” all run them. Categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship packages appear. Tables are sold. Shortlists get longer. Winners become more plentiful.
And the running time of these events now seems close to breaching human rights.
Excellence has become scalable.
The commercial model is not complicated.
Charge for entries.
Charge for sponsorship.
Don’t pay judges.
Sell tables.
Publish a press release for every winner.
Upsell webinars or publications to winners.
Encourage social sharing.
Offer early bird discounts for next year.
Repeat annually.
It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. They are a revenue engine.
They are not designed around truth. They are designed around throughput.
More categories means more finalists.
More finalists means more tables.
More tables means more revenue.
Excellence has become a unit of sale.
None of this means every award is meaningless. There are still programmes with real judging rigour, respected panels, and genuine peer recognition. But the signal to noise ratio has collapsed. We all see it.
Research into award credibility across professional services shows the same structural weaknesses again and again.
First, self reported performance.
Most entries are narratives, not audits. Impact is described, not verified. Judges rarely have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge it in depth. I agreed to judge one awards programme for B2B marketers and only did it once. We were constantly rushed to decide without properly interrogating any of the claims.
Second, category inflation.
As events grow, so do the labels. Not because the discipline has become that granular, but because more categories mean more revenue. “Best Use of X in Y for Z Segment in this Very Specific Geography” is not taxonomy. It is inventory creation.
Third, pay to play dynamics.
Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not explicitly buy trophies, but they do buy probability. Volume of entries, visibility on the night, and commercial proximity all increase the odds of walking away with something shiny.
The song’s line about judges working for free is also worth highlighting. Most panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess hundreds of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level.
Then comes the theatre.
The black tie.
The drum roll.
The host.
The lighting.
The word “prestigious” doing heroic work in every sentence.
Awards borrow the visual grammar of credibility. But credibility does not come from staging. It comes from consequence.
Which leads to the uncomfortable question.
Do customers care?
Every serious study of B2B buying behaviour says broadly the same thing. Buyers trust peers, proof, outcomes, and experience. Analyst validation and references matter. Case studies matter. Demonstrable results matter.
Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when comparing suppliers on large tenders, but experienced B2B buyers know the game.
Journalists know this too. Which is why most award press releases die quietly and quickly. They are not news. They are advertisements in narrative form, picked up only by automated newswires.
Internally, however, awards serve a different function.
They validate effort and pad out a CV.
They give younger team members something to celebrate.
They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out.
They give leaders some “good news” to share.
They offer a morale moment in hard quarters.
There is nothing wrong with recognition. The problem starts when the symbol replaces the substance.
You see it in the Monday morning Slack message.
“Great job team, I’ll add it to the website and pitch deck.”
You see it in agency credentials that lead with trophies before outcomes, which is deeply off putting to competent CMOs.
You see it in board slides where “industry recognition” fills space when pipeline is thin.
When applause becomes easier to earn than results, people start optimising for the applause.
That is why the Table for Ten lyric lands.
In many award circuits, the fastest way to feel like a winner is not to build something genuinely brilliant. It is to pay for a beautifully written entry, buy a table, submit in multiple categories, and increase your statistical odds.
The plastic trophy is not the problem. The confusion of what it represents is.
Awards can be a byproduct of excellence.
They are a terrible substitute for it.
Enjoy the night.
Celebrate your team.
Clap for the winners.
Take the photo.
But be honest.
If your proudest slide is the awards slide, you should be worried.
Because the market does not care how many times you have been shortlisted.
It only cares whether what you do actually works.
And if your marketing success depends on trophies rather than customers, you are not building a brand.
You are renting applause.
Listen to Table for Ten on Marketing Mixtape
