Creative borders have disappeared: Armenian juror at Global Awards shares the formula for success

The world’s largest creative competitions, including the Webby, Anthem, The Drum and Digiday awards, receive entries from agencies on every continent. At the same time, the circle of people who decide which works deserve to win is also gradually changing.

Juries that were once formed almost entirely in a handful of Western cities increasingly include professionals from countries and regions that the industry rarely paid attention to in the past. Armenian names have also begun to appear among them.

How is this change perceived from the inside? To find the answer, Armenpress spoke with international awards juror Elen Gasparyan, a young Armenian creative professional and Creative Director at Davel Creative Agency who works with international markets from Los Angeles. The conversation focused on a question that is being asked increasingly often amid these changes: does it still matter where a creative professional was born when the industry is increasingly evaluated by international juries representing a broad geography?

The winners of the Webby Awards, once described by The New York Times as the internet’s highest honor, are selected by an academy comprising leading figures in technology, media and advertising. The Anthem Awards are also organized by the same academy, while The Drum and Digiday are among the most widely read and respected names in global marketing and media.

Gasparyan is an executive member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a status granted by invitation only. The same status is held by Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the internet; Bluetooth inventor Jaap Haartsen; journalist Katie Couric; and Joanne Jang, General Manager of OpenAI Labs.

Elen, looking at the jury process from the inside, how would you assess the situation: is the global creative industry’s attention still concentrated around a handful of cities, or does it now cover a broader geography?

Less than it used to, and that is the real story of this decade. When you judge blind, and the good competitions do judge blind, you are not looking at a logo on a letterhead. You are looking at an idea. I have scored work from studios I had never heard of, in countries most people could not place on a map, and it was better than the work coming out of the famous addresses. The gatekeeping that used to happen before the work reached the jury is what is breaking down. That is the shift worth writing about.

And yet the winners' lists are still dominated by the same large agencies. Why the gap?

Because access is not the same as visibility. A brilliant idea in a small market still has to be entered, translated, framed, sometimes just noticed. The talent is evenly distributed. The infrastructure around the talent is not. A young team in Yerevan or Tbilisi does the work, but nobody tells them the door is even open, so they never knock. I judge partly because I want to be one of the people who leaves that door open a little wider.

You are describing your own path without quite saying so. You started in banking.

I did, at eighteen, and people are always surprised by that. But banking taught me the thing that actually matters in this profession, which is how to understand a person before you try to persuade them. I spent years at HSBC in sales and marketing before I ever called myself creative. When we started the agency in 2017 I was about to give birth, we had no funding, and the market we were building in was tiny. On paper it was the wrong time and the wrong place. It taught me not to trust the phrase "wrong place."

In 2022 you expanded the agency into the American market. Was that a verdict on Armenia, that the work had to leave home to be taken seriously?

I would push back on the word leave, because I did not leave anything. I expanded. The agency grew into new markets and I run it today from Los Angeles, but Armenia was never something I packed up and walked away from. What I wanted was to prove, to myself first, that work built in a small market could stand in the largest one. It could. We were judged against agencies many times our size, and the work still won gold. I do not tell young people that to impress them. I tell it so they stop waiting for permission.

One of your Los Angeles campaigns, "See Me, Not My Cancer," traveled much further than the city it was made for. What did that teach you about which work crosses borders?

That the ideas which travel are the human ones, not the clever ones. That campaign, made for a cancer support community here, asked a very simple thing: look at the person before you look at the diagnosis. There was nothing culturally specific about it, which is exactly why it reached people far outside Los Angeles and why other communities asked for their own version. Cleverness is local. Dignity is universal. When I judge, that is the line I am always testing work against.

When you sit down to score an entry, what actually separates the winners?

Restraint, usually. Young creatives think a jury rewards the loudest, most decorated piece. It almost never does. What survives a room of tired judges at the end of a long day is a clear idea that respects the audience's intelligence. I would rather see one honest thought executed simply than ten effects hiding the absence of a thought. That is true whether the entry came from a network agency or from two people with a laptop.

What do you tell the young Armenian creatives who write to you convinced the global industry is closed to them?

The same thing every time. Geography is not a ceiling. If your work is strong, the market will find you, but only if you let it be seen. Stop rehearsing the reasons you will not be taken seriously and put the work in the room. The mindset that matters is not ambition for yourself, it is the will to contribute, to make something that changes how people see each other. The market has more room in it than they have been told.

And what would you like to see change on the Armenian side of that equation?

I would like the confidence to catch up to the talent, because the talent is already there. We do not need to become someone else's idea of a creative capital. We need to enter the room as we are and trust that it reads. Every time an Armenian name appears on one of these juries or one of these winners' lists, the next young person from Gyumri or Vanadzor finds it a little easier to believe it is possible. That is the only reason any of this is worth talking about.

Interview by Nane Isahakyan