Advertising awards should be a byproduct not the aim.

Recently for Saudi Day (September 19) Heinz went brandless and colored itself with the colors of the Saudi flag. The aim was to express "our irrational act of love to join our Saudi consumers in celebrating the Kingdom with its rich culture, heritage, and unity,” according to Passant El Ghannam, Head of Marketing at Kraft Heinz MEA. I can already see the case presented to advertising awards - "we allowed consumers to scan QR codes to share their own messages of pride, we hired in situ calligraphers to personalize the bottles so as for consumers to keep one-of-a-kind mementos, and sales grew by (insert impressive number here)". The whole thing reeks of advertising awards rather than a normal campaign targeted towards consumers.
A long long time ago (2003 to be specific), an agency in KSA I was working in was contacted by newspapers telling them that GMC was launching a massive campaign the next day. Since we represented Toyota they wanted to know if we were going to launch anything ourselves. That same day - a statistic fell into our lap: KSA was the second worldwide owner of Toyota Landcruiser per capita in the world after Japan. The client servicing threw it at us and literally gave us about ten minutes to get an ad done as he was off to visit the client. I raked my brains and came up with the Al Mutanabi verse:
وتصغر في عين العظيم العظائم
And the greater things seem insignificant in the eye of the mighty.
I asked if there was a photo of a Landcruiser in the Saudi desert at night and slapped a text that went - we had nothing to do with it, it was all because of you (the consumer) and went on profusely thanking Toyota Landcruiser owners for their loyalty, good taste, faith etc, etc.
To say that the ad took the kingdom by storm the next day was selling it short. The GMC campaign was simply not talked about while every Saudi was congratulating themselves for picking a Landcruiser. Maybe, in today's world this might be an "award-winning" ad. But who cares? The end clients loved it, felt pride in it, of course it does not hurt that the agency client (Toyota) approved it swiftly and was also incredibly pleased with it.
But this is what is happening these days - every other ad is thought of as an award-winning contestant rather than one aimed at the end client, who will buy, take pride, be faithful to the brand, and hopefully will propagate by word of mouth to people he/she knows or cares about. Because awards should not be the aim of an ad, or any ad campaign. Sure, if it does produce awards so much the better, but focusing solely on ads above the precedence of targeting the consumer is truly like putting the cart before the horse.
I said it again and will say it once more, every ad has three purposes no matter what brand it represents: to introduce a product, to entice the consumer to want it, and to tell the consumer that the product is available in the market.
Winning awards is not part of the initial plan.

So, about the Heinz x Absolut pasta sauce

So there is it, everybody is doing it, so why can't I?

Everyone is - and rightly so - speaking about the Heinz x Absolut vodka pasta sauce. In case you can log to this link here, you'll get all the info. Well Heinz is fresh from the triumph that even AI understands Ketchup as its own distinctive branding (here) or that in 2021 when people were asked to draw ketchup it invariably was Heinz that was drawn (here). 

Well, Heinz admits it is late to the game, but well, they did catch up indeed offering all kinds of pasta alla vodka, as well as cocktail recipes and the list continues. The ads above by Wunderman Thompson Spain were inspired by 80s Absolut vodka ads - and before anyone says anything, no I could not locate the originals for all my research. I mean yes, it is obvious they resemble classic Absolut ads from the heyday but also I could not locate which.

Now considering I am very biased towards old ads I find these speak to me personally, and yes I like the retro element in them (you might like these links as well - here, here or some fine samples here), which go back to the time when to misquote that Smirnoff ad which I cannot find anywhere "the bottle was more important than the vodka" but I guess I am doing the cardinal sin here of mentioning a competitor...