What is the Gunn Report for Media?
Almost all businesses will face the need for advertising, in fact in many cases it will be one of the largest expenses that they will incur. And with the emergence of the internet, also internet advertising will be often used in an attempt to boost the profits. Therefore businesses want to make sure that they are getting the best value for their dollar by making sure they are working with the top agencies. This can be tricky since it is often not clear who the top agencies are. This is something that the Gunn report aims to clear up.
The Gunn report for media is a way to identify the most successful advertising agencies and the best campaigns from the previous year. Obviously this is a pretty big deal for the advertisers who will likely spend millions of dollars on their campaign and will definitely want to know how good an agency is before they put their money down on it. The goal of the Gunn report is to try to rank how well each agency did the previous year with its campaigns so that advertisers will have a good idea of who the best are.
The Gunn report was founded by Donald Gunn in 1999. After retiring from a career in advertising that had lasted for nearly forty years Gunn decided that a way was needed to rank the top agencies. Gunn started his career as an account executive before moving on to spend many years as a copywriter. Ultimately he would reach the position of creative director for the Burnett agency. This experience made him the ideal person to try to determine which of the ad agencies did the best job. The approach he came up with has its flaws but it does seem to be the best approach available.
The approach that the Gunn report uses for ranking the advertising agencies is to look at the awards each agency receives. Every year the advertising industry hands out awards to the most successful campaigns. The Gunn report simply looks at the dozens of different awards shows that exist in the world of advertising and rank the agencies on how many they have one. The obvious flaw in this is that it does rewarded the larger agencies since the more campaigns you run the more awards you are likely to win. This is a big part of why BBDO have been the top ranked agency for eight of the twelve years that the report has been published.
It is important to keep in mind that the Gunn report is not a ranking of how effective an advertising campaign is, it is a ranking of the creative side of the campaign. While these often go together there will be times when the most creative campaign that wins all the awards will not be effective at attracting customers. This is something that has to be kept in mind if you are using the Gunn report as a way to decide which agency should run your next campaign.