I had the honor of being a judge yesterday for the first round of the 2009 Effie awards.

If you aren’t familiar with the Effies, they are advertising awards that place an emphasis on results, as opposed to just creative or some other intangible criteria. As they note on their Web site “Effie awards Ideas that Work – the great ideas that achieve real results and the strategy that goes into creating them. ”

During my marathon morning session, I judged 10 campaigns across multiple categories, ranging from regional to national campaigns, huge budgets to non-existent budgets, including products and services across a variety of categories.

In addition to serving as an amazing motivation session for me as an advertising agency principal, it was nice to be reminded of how effective sound advertising strategies can be to our clients. The results of the cases I reviewed were all impressive, generating strong returns on investment in terms of revenue, bottom line, and other key business metrics.

In these difficult times, it was refreshing to spend 3 hours being reminded of how important solid strategy, creative, media and advertising stewardship are to driving sales and bottom lines.

There is a lot of talk these days about company’s cutting marketing and advertising budgets. Might I suggest that the executives evaluating these difficult scenarios stop by the Effie Web site winner’s gallery and review some of the winning cases. Sometimes even the most seasoned business veterans need to be reminded of how valuable well designed advertising and marketing programs can be.

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