Do marketing awards still reflect how brands grow in 2026?

New Delhi: Marketing awards such as the Effies are “fast becoming obsolete” and lagging how modern brands grow, Shubho Sengupta, Advisor, Marketing, Nirmit Bharat, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Sengupta argued that advertising effectiveness is increasingly driven by “continuous, data-driven systems powered by creators, algorithms, lifecycle funnels, and real-time optimisation”, rather than “single big idea campaigns” that awards juries typically reward.

“Campaigns with clear attribution and neat results are becoming passe,” he wrote, adding that growth models built on iterative flywheels and product-led adoption can look less “award-friendly” even when they deliver stronger business impact.

Sengupta said Effies-style juries tend to favour structured narratives and big ideas. He said this can disadvantage brands that grow through ongoing improvement loops, product experience and community-led adoption.

Citing Zerodha as an example, Sengupta wrote that the company would struggle to win at the Effies because “there is no campaign as such”.

He described its growth as product-led, rooted in low-cost brokerage and strong user experience, supported by referral effects and word-of-mouth via an educational content ecosystem.

He pointed to Zerodha’s “Varsity”, blogs and community, and said the brand’s trust-based positioning is built through continuous, iterative improvements rather than conventional campaigns. “Am not sure if you can call them marketing campaigns,” he added.

Sengupta also said the Effies do not favour smaller brands that are “genuine case studies” disrupting how Indian brands grow. “A Zomato will be (and is) feted at the Effies but not a Meesho,” he wrote.

Responding to the post, Hari Krishnan, Education Mentor, Brand Communications, Altera Institute, pushed back on the framing, saying the Effies were created to address subjectivity in creative awards rather than to serve as a broad measure of marketing effectiveness.

“Let’s pull back a bit,” Harikrishnan wrote. He said the starting point of the Effies was that creative campaigns were becoming a “beauty show” with high subjectivity.

He added that “objective parameters were thrown in to evaluate creative campaigns and their impact on brand scores, sales, behaviour change, perception, etc.”

Harikrishnan described the Effies as “at best a creative campaign effectiveness award” and argued that marketing today is “a much larger universe, of which a campaign is a small subset”. 

However, he added, “Calling EFFIES a ‘Marketing Effectiveness’ award needs to be questioned.”

Nishad Ramachandran, Chief Digital and AI Officer, Vidzai Digital, also weighed in, describing practical barriers in trying to enter always-on, analytics-led work into the Effies framework. “When I worked at Cequity and tried to enter our work for Effies, we struggled,” he wrote.

Ramachandran said the entry form and its questions were difficult for his team to map to how they defined and ran work. “The entry form and the questions in there in many ways were Chinese to us English speakers,” he wrote.

He added that his campaign analysts could provide “the exact ROI for any of the campaigns we ran” at any time, but the word “campaign” itself differed between traditional agency definitions and how their teams operated.

“We may run dozens of daily campaigns for a brand or a segment, and have the results trickle in daily, weekly and fortnightly. And we would be iterating all the time,” he wrote. Ramachandran said that at Cequity, “big ideas” were often “a steady set of processes, nudges, tweaks and such”.

“For us, campaigns were little streams that would flow into a river of outputs and outcomes,” he wrote, adding that the team eventually “gave up trying to impress Effie juries.”

At the same time, Sengupta said winning an Effie still signals strong marketing capability. “It takes real marketing brains to win an Effie,” he wrote, adding that, for now, it remains “probably the north star of effectiveness”.

He ended by questioning whether the awards framework reflects the direction of marketing. “But does it reflect our marketing times, the way we are headed? I am not sure,” Sengupta wrote.

In the same thread, Sayantan Ray, Advisory Board Member, BuzzVerse, broadened the criticism beyond the Effies, taking aim at the Smarties.

“I worked for a startup in the mobile marketing domain, and we won the Gold at Smarties,” Ray wrote. He alleged that the “back channelling” involved in winning “despite having data to prove the effectiveness of the campaign had to be seen to be believed”. 

Ray added, “At that stage, it was who knew whom and how much one could pay for an award.”

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