A response to your work is the ultimate recognition. An acknowledgement that it got noticed, that it connected and that it moved someone. Whether a purchase; a view; a like; a laugh; a tear; a share; a comment; an homage…it’s all good.

Awards are just one form of response and recognition. They are seductive and still the main industry barometer of our ideas, but they’re also destructive and increasingly devalued. Throw a stick down any London street and you’ll probably hit ten ‘award-winning’ Creatives. All of the awards I’ve won are nice, and I’d be a fool not to be particularly proud of one or two, but to judge our work purely by awards and obsess about their accumulation is to miss the point about what we do.

Below are the moments of recognition that mean the most to me. ((Afterwards, there is some selective awards-boasting, where the accolade seemed to merit it.)

• Hearing stories of whole cinemas singing along to the Honda ‘Grrr’ commercial.

• Witnessing a cinema audience applaud the launch commercial of my new Gordon’s Gin campaign.

• Being rung up by a man who wanted a life size copy of a Gordon’s Gin 48-sheet poster so he could stick it on a wall inside his huge 16^th century mansion.

• Bumping into someone outside of advertising that I hadn’t seen for years and discovering that he had stuck one of my long-copy press ads for Compaq Computers onto a wall in his office, and had urged all his colleagues to read it.