‘Tis the season to see agency people (my colleagues among them) grinning while gripping the multiple awards they’ve won.

A season of celebration, self-congratulation, of endless parades to the stage and of dad dancing on the floors of Mayfair’s finest hotels.

This is all very well and good (and honestly quite a lot of fun) but what are we actually rewarding ourselves for, and could we be more deserving of it?

If it’s for the hard graft we all put in to tell brand stories and make ideas happen, we indisputably do deserve it. If it’s for the endless client expectation and crisis management, we very much do. And if it’s for coming up with creative ideas that earn media attention, in most cases…we probably do.

But if it’s proven, tangible impact we have on our clients’ brands or businesses, then in many cases we need to improve to deserve the bubbly, the bites or the bounty.

Having judged quite a few awards and having recently spent time talking to those who have judged, it’s clear the way we recognise success needs to be better. It’s not that PR doesn’t have an impact, it’s that despite some progress being made, we’re still pretty crap at proving it.

We talk about abolishing AVE, AMEC’s Barcelona Principles, ‘robust KPIs’ and ‘tangible impact’ but, when push comes to shove, we too often either bow to internal pressures for old school metrics, manipulate inadequate numbers to make them look better or say we reached 500m people with our latest campaign (which I’m not sure we did).

It’s absolutely right that we celebrate the work we do and the coverage it generates – and, increasingly, the social reach we generate through influencers – but, as an industry, we really need to do more to demonstrate and celebrate the impact of what we do beyond the traditional.

It is almost indisputable that well-conceived and well-executed PR campaigns have a huge impact on awareness, brand perception and consumer behaviour and yet the amount of award entries that call this out properly are few and far between.

This is broadly down to three things.

Firstly, numerophobia. If I had a pound for every time I heard a PR say ‘I’m not a numbers person’, I’d be able to afford a much higher-quality evaluation than most agencies or clients seems to want to sanction. It’s basic maths so we should get comfortable with it.

Secondly, inertia. The client hasn’t said anything so there’s no need to change anything. Sooner or later the client will say something and it’ll probably be “We really aren’t seeing the value you’re giving us, we’re going out to pitch”. Getting ahead of this now means much less pain later.

Finally, false assumptions about budget. It’s a myth that better measurement costs a mint. Often clients are already paying for services than can be upgraded cheaply. Most of them have data people we can talk to (and tools we can plug in to). Talk to them and you might be surprised how easy it is to layer on metrics that really mean something.

If we can tackle these three things and apply our famous creativity to the way we demonstrate impact, the champagne – and our successes – will taste sweeter and we really will have something to dress up for.