Observations from the jury seat at Workspace Digital Awards 2026 — one of the largest Russian digital-marketing awards. Having evaluated more than 200 entries in a row, I saw not glossy creative but a live cross-section of the market — with its strengths and its structural limits.
This piece was originally published in Russian on Cossa. Below is the extended version for readers of the site.
A hierarchy of metrics: five levels of maturity
When you look at 200+ competition cases in a row, you start to see the market not through the polished lens of creative visuals that flash through feeds and news, but through the live numbers and effectiveness that agencies are actually accountable for.
Workspace Digital Awards is one of the largest Russian awards in digital. The volume and variety of participants and cases makes it a near-perfect cross-section of the market. The main evaluation criteria: effectiveness, distinctiveness, packaging. In that order. Effectiveness comes first — but it is exactly where authors of cases struggle most.
If you arrange effectiveness indicators by their business impact, a clear hierarchy emerges:
- Level 1 — media metrics: reach, impressions, CTR, click count.
- Level 2 — engagement metrics: followers, likes, time on site, viewing depth.
- Level 3 — conversion metrics: leads, applications, installs, CPL/CPI.
- Level 4 — commercial metrics: sales, revenue, market share, GMV.
- Level 5 — business metrics: ROAS, ROI, LTV, unit economics.
Most competition cases live between levels 2 and 3. This is not about execution quality — it is about access to data and the model of working with the client.
Who reaches ROAS and why
Within the shortlist, a category of cases stands out clearly: those ready to speak the language of return on investment. They share three common traits.
E-commerce and marketplaces. E-comm by nature has access to real-time sales data. When revenue is visible, calculating ROAS is technically straightforward. That is exactly why e-com cases more often reach levels 4–5 and speak in terms of ad-spend share or multiples.
Performance specialisation. Agencies that position themselves as performance-first rather than "full-service" or "integrated" carry an internal culture of end-to-end analytics. For them, ROAS is not the closing slide — it is the starting KPI. Such cases are recognisable immediately: they start not with the "client's task" but with a business goal in numbers.
Large business with mature analytics. Cases from the largest banks and financial institutions with developed BI infrastructure allow the agency to operate on real product-conversion data. When the client themselves knows how to count, the agency is forced to keep up.
Why most stop at CPL
Right away, worth noting: this is not a reason for judgement — rather, a need to understand the mechanics and the causes.
Data access. The agency knows everything about traffic and nothing about revenue — unless the client opens the CRM. And most clients do not. This is not stinginess. It is simply that clients have not built the integration, do not trust, or do not see the point. As a result, the agency honestly reports what it can see: "3,400 leads at 890 roubles each".
Attribution as an unsolved problem. Even when data exists, the question arises: whose credit is this? Context ads, SEO, retargeting, the sales manager, the on-site discount — in effect everything influences the outcome if you cannot isolate a direct relationship. Agencies unwilling to defend their attribution model prefer to stop at a "safe" metric level.
Competition logic. The case is written not for the client but for the jury — where other agencies often sit. Among them there is a consensus that leads and reach are "fine". ROAS requires verification, explanation, defence. It is simpler to show a beautiful CTR.
What this means for the client
The main takeaway from reviewing 200+ cases in a row: the market is good at counting reach and leads, but only a handful reach genuine business analytics. And this is not about "bad" agencies — it is about how the entire chain of "client → data → report" is set up.
If you are a brand that wants business results from an agency, not media results, the work goes beyond the brief. You need to open the CRM to the agency, agree on a unified attribution model, synchronise definitions of "new user", build cohorts and payback metrics. Without this, the agency will remain in the upper funnel — not because it does not want to count, but because it has no instruments to do so.
And conversely: if you are an agency that wants to play in the top league, investments in your own analytics culture pay back faster than investments in creative. It is exactly the cases with level 4–5 effectiveness that win not only awards but long-term contracts.