Each New Year start the same way with ads from health clubs trying to make us feel bad and keep our New Year resolutions. And then the list and awards pops up… “Best of…” or “worst of…”

Many of the lists are just for fun. But even so they can be damaging … One list I really hate is the list of “Worst ads awards”. One of them is “The Tracy Awards”. Another is AdFreak.

Most of these lists are based on liking. And if you are a marketing professional you know very well that using liking as the only measurement of success could easily make it the worst marketing campaign you ever made.

To me a good example is the introduction of the Wash & Go shampoo in Norway through Midelfart. When it arrived early in 1990 all the ads was made in the US and there was a lot of discussions (both among professionals and amateurs) about how dreadful they where. The only problem is that the introduction was one of the most successful one in the company’s history. Midelfart and Procter & Gamble sold more than one million shampoos the first 90 days and their market share in the Norwegian market is extremely high… But again; Nobody liked the ads.

In December I received a mail from a woman that told me she hated one of our ads. She thought it was one of the worst commercials she had ever seen. She had seen it earlier in 2010 and thought it was bad then, but when she saw it again in December she just had to write us to tell us how bad it really was.

The problem is that the commercial worked very well and helped us make 2010 one of the best years ever…

But what I hate the most is that I read AdFreak and The Tracy Awards… and I laugh…