La guida completa per Agenzie e Brand ai premi internazionali: qual è la partecipazione delle realtà italiane? E siamo davvero sottorappresentati? Scopriamolo insieme in questo articolo.
Italy has one of the longest creative traditions in the world. Design, architecture, fashion, visual communication: decades of globally recognised excellence.
Yet at the most recent Cannes Lions, Italian agencies won less than 2% of the awards given. Italy is the fifth-largest economy in the European Union. In the world of international awards, it is not even in the top ten.
This is not a problem of quality of work. Italian agencies produce excellent work. Rather, it is a problem of how that work is documented, told and positioned in the international market. A problem that reproduces itself and that, without deliberate intervention, can only grow.
In this ninth article of the Gold Brief series we examine the reasons for Italy’s under-representation in international awards, the mechanisms that perpetuate it and the ways to build a recognisable presence in the global marketing landscape.
Gold Brief is the section of the Bliss blog for those who want to understand how recognition in marketing really works. Here you will find practical guides to the international awards that matter (creativity, strategy, performance, design, SEO, innovation and much more), with everything you need to enter. Because the perfect brief is not written in a day: if anything, it is built every day.
The Data: What the Archives Show
The public archives of the leading international awards tell a tragic story for our country. At the Cannes Lions, the country with the most Lions is the United Kingdom, followed by the United States, Germany and Australia. Italy appears consistently on the shortlists of a few specific categories, notably Design and Print, but its presence in the most competitive strategic categories (Strategy, Effectiveness, Integrated) is systematically marginal.
At the Ad Age Creativity Awards, the landscape is even more concentrated on the Anglo-Saxon market: Italian agencies rarely appear among those shortlisted in the most strategically relevant categories.
In the SEO Awards, the Italian market is under-represented compared with countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, which produce a number of entries and wins proportionally far higher than their share of the European digital market.
The difference can only be explained by the culture of entering.
The First Reason: The Culture of Documentation
Agencies in English-speaking countries, particularly in the British market, build their case studies while they build their projects. Results are thus archived in real time. Benchmarks are set before the work begins. Strategic decisions are documented as they are made. When awards season arrives, the material already exists. Entering is therefore a matter of organisation and storytelling: not reconstruction.
Italian agencies tend to work differently. The focus is on executing the project. Documentation is seen as a secondary activity, often postponed until after the project closes. When awards season arrives, the material does not exist in usable form. Data must be retrieved from clients, benchmarks reconstructed, strategic decisions remembered and articulated after the fact. The result is an entry weaker than the underlying work deserves.
This difference comes down to operational habit. And operational habits change only through a system.
The Second Reason: The Language Barrier
All the major international awards require entries in English. Cannes Lions, Ad Age Creativity Awards, European Search Awards, Search Engine Land Awards, D&AD, Effie: the language of submission is English, without exception.
For an Italian agency, this introduces a real cost. Writing an effective submission in a second language takes more time, more revisions and often external resources. The result, if not handled carefully, is a narrative that is technically correct but lacks the density and precision that an entry written in one’s native language naturally achieves.
But the language barrier can be overcome. It is a cost, yes, but not a structural impediment. Spanish, French and German agencies face the same obstacle and regularly produce winning entries. The difference is not the language. It is the strategic decision to invest in the quality of the entry as one invests in the quality of the work.
A case study written by a native English speaker from detailed materials supplied by the agency costs between 500 and 1,500 euros. Less than the entry fee for a Cannes Lions. The cost-benefit ratio is favourable in almost every scenario.
The Third Reason: The Award Seen as a Cost
In the Italian consultancy and communications market, taking part in awards is almost universally accounted for as a cost. Entry fees, team time, production of the case study video: everything is added up into a single expense line whose return cannot be directly measured in the short term.
In the Anglo-Saxon market, the same participation is accounted for as an investment in positioning. The reasoning is structured differently: what is it worth to be shortlisted at Cannes in terms of market visibility, the ability to attract new clients and bargaining power in negotiations? This analysis almost always leads to a conclusion in favour of participating.
The difference lies in the willingness to calculate the return. Those who do not calculate the value of international positioning have no means of assessing the investment in awards. Those who do almost always find that the opportunity cost of not entering exceeds the cost of entering.
The Fourth Reason: Market Fragmentation
The Italian agency market is more fragmented than the British, German or French markets. The concentration of resources in large organisations is lower. The number of small and medium-sized independent agencies is higher.
This fragmentation has two direct consequences. The first is financial: international award fees represent a higher percentage of turnover for a twenty-person agency than for one of two hundred. The second concerns capacity: building a solid entry requires time and internal resources that smaller firms struggle to allocate without diverting capacity from clients.
But fragmentation is not only a constraint. It is also a structural opportunity that the Italian market fails to exploit. The categories dedicated to independent agencies, found in almost every international award, Independent Agency of the Year, Best Small Agency, Tiny But Mighty, are often the least competitive in absolute terms. A mid-sized Italian agency with excellent work and a well-constructed entry competes in far more favourable conditions than the large international organisations.
The Fifth Reason: The Self-Perpetuating Cycle
The four preceding reasons combine into a self-reinforcing mechanism.
Italian agencies do not take part in international awards consistently. They do not accumulate experience in building entries, nor do they develop a culture of documentation. They do not build visibility in international archives, attract international clients in proportion to the quality of their work, or have the critical mass to invest in awards. And so the cycle begins again.
The entry point into the opposite, virtuous cycle is a deliberate decision, not a condition reached automatically. It requires investing in the first entry with the same seriousness as a project for a major client; building a culture of documentation before awards season arrives; treating awards as part of the agency’s strategic positioning. And that in itself makes a great difference.
What Winning Agencies Do Differently
The Italian agencies that have built a consistent presence in international awards share three operational traits that set them apart from the market average.
The first is that they treat documentation as part of the production process. Every significant project has a dedicated file that is updated throughout the project. Benchmarks are set at the outset. Data are collected at regular intervals. Strategic decisions are recorded together with the rationale behind them.
The second is that they select categories before selecting awards. They analyse the winners of the last two editions in every category of interest, assess the competitive landscape and identify where their work is most likely to be judged in the most favourable context. Strategic entries produce better results than instinctive ones.
The third is that they build the entry as a stand-alone product, with the same care they give to the work it describes. The video case study is produced with a precise narrative structure. The written submission is reviewed by someone outside the project. The English is polished by a native speaker. The level of care in the entry signals the level of care in the work.
The Road That Remains Open
The gap between the quality of Italian work and its presence in international awards is not a fixed fact. It is the result of operational habits that can be changed.
The international awards market is not closed to Italian agencies. It is open to anyone who builds an entry that meets the juries’ criteria. And those criteria do not favour Anglo-Saxon agencies for cultural reasons: they favour those who document precisely, tell their story clearly and prove their case with verifiable data. These capabilities depend neither on native language nor on agency size.
Italian agencies that pursue international awards methodically build a competitive advantage in their own market that competitors who do not cannot replicate. Every Lion, every shortlist, every presence in the public archives of the most authoritative festivals is a signal that endures and works independently of the agency that produced it.
The work already exists. What is missing is the system to tell its story.
New Connections (FAQ)
Do Italian agencies face objective structural disadvantages at international awards?
Yes, two. The first is language: all entries must be submitted in English, which introduces an additional cost compared with agencies from English-speaking countries. The second is average size: the Italian market is more fragmented, and international award fees weigh more heavily on the budgets of smaller firms. Both are real but not decisive. Spanish and French agencies, with the same linguistic disadvantages, achieve a greater international presence than Italian ones. The differential is cultural.
Which international award categories are most accessible to mid-sized Italian agencies?
The categories dedicated to independent agencies are the most favourable. Independent Agency of the Year, found in many international awards, by definition excludes the networks of the large holding groups. Categories such as Tiny But Mighty at the Ad Age Awards or Best Small SEO Agency at the European Search Awards reward the specific strengths of smaller organisations. New thematic categories, such as Best Use of AI, still have an open field where agencies of every size compete on more equal terms.
How much is it worth for an Italian agency to invest in an entry for an international award?
The correct calculation compares the total cost of the entry, fee plus internal time plus video production, with the expected value of the positioning it generates. Being shortlisted at Cannes Lions or the Ad Age Awards brings visibility in the public archives of the industry’s most authoritative festivals, backlinks from high-authority domains, credibility in the international market and a verifiable signal to prospective clients. For an agency that wants to grow beyond the Italian market, the opportunity cost of not building this profile almost always exceeds the cost of a well-prepared entry.
What if I don’t speak English?
The most effective solution is to build the submission in Italian, with all the precision and density your native language allows, and then entrust it to a native English speaker with industry experience for translation and review. The cost is lower than the entry fee for a single award. The result is an entry with the narrative quality of a text written by someone who knows the work and the linguistic precision of someone who knows the language. The two skills need not reside in the same person.