In an industry where budgets are shrinking but expectations aren’t, perhaps it’s time to rethink what we mean by creative value.
There has always been an uncomfortable relationship between creativity and money. Give a team a bigger budget and the possibilities expand: bigger production, bigger talent, bigger locations, bigger technology. But does bigger necessarily mean better?
At the PM Society, we don’t think it does. That’s why, this year, we’re introducing The Ingenuity Award, celebrating smart ideas executed with a production budget of £15,000 or less.
Because when you can’t simply spend your way out of a creative problem, you have to think.
When budgets shrink, expectations don’t
Budgets across our industry are being squeezed. Clients are under pressure to do more with less, yet are asking agencies to deliver more work, across more channels.
But the creative bar hasn’t moved. We’re still expected to cut through, engage, change behaviour, make complicated science compelling and create work people remember.
That’s where ingenuity comes in.
Constraints can force us to ask better questions: What is the real problem? What does the audience actually need? What could we do differently? What could we remove? What already exists that we could use in a completely new way?
Some of the most inventive solutions emerge when someone doesn’t have every resource at their disposal - and turns that constraint into creative fuel.
The £15k challenge
The Ingenuity Award isn’t about rewarding the cheapest campaign, or making £15,000 look like £150,000. It’s about recognising where the constraint has become part of the creativity.
Maybe it’s an unexpected use of an existing channel. A partnership nobody else thought of. A smart application of technology. Or simply an idea so sharp that it doesn’t need layers of production wrapped around it.
The question isn’t “How much did you spend?”
It’s “What did you think of that nobody else did?”
And at a time when AI, technology and increasingly accessible production tools mean almost anything can be made, that question feels more important than ever. When everything is possible, the real creative challenge is knowing what is worth making.
A bigger opportunity for smaller teams
The £15k ceiling also creates space for smaller agencies, emerging talent, entrepreneurial teams and resourceful client-agency partnerships to compete on a different playing field.
Creative excellence shouldn’t belong only to teams with the biggest production budgets. Sometimes the smartest idea comes from the team with the fewest resources - because they found a better way to use them.
So, what can you do with £15k?
Show us what you made possible with less. Enter The Ingenuity Award, and prove that the smartest idea in the room doesn’t need the biggest budget.