Promotional advertising that sells vs creative advertising that does not drive sales but wins awards. Which one would you do? why?

Both are inportant in a Brands Journey. As an Agency we contribute towards sucessfully building brands.

While promotional Advertising is hardsell.

Creative Award winning Advertising is softsell.

At the end of the day both sell & promote the brand.

Although a lot of marketers and especially creative professionals think, advertising (and by that I mean creative development of commercial communication) is not an art form. It has its specific purpose, and that is to drive awareness, influence perception, increase consideration and so on, which ultimately translates into sales. Thus, the bottom line in evaluating a promotional activity, is the ROI. The challenge consists of assigning various factors of importance to the specific components of the activities, in order to determine the actual contribution to sales. However, a marketer should spring into action without an objective. If the objective of the activity is different (e.g. raise awareness, change the brand’s perception) thus not connected to sales, implicitly there will be other KPI’s used to measure the success of the actions (going to extreme, it can be nomber of awards the campaign has won). Still, those objectives are in the end, supporting or intermediary objectives of the ultimate, critical objective: sales and profit. 

promotional advertising that sells coz eod the business is about roi. but there are ads which have served both the purpose - awards as well as keep the cash register ringing.