It’s unclear whether all these awards will stand cancelled, but the perpetrators and their employers (and their clients, sadly) will, at the least, be named and shamed.
Behind-the-scenes negotiations are on – with threats by some of the erring agencies of a boycott of future Abbys if the awards are annulled.
That’s preposterous.
Because, technically, the decision to rescind, if taken, will be taken by the Awards Governing Council, which comprises senior executives from the Advertising Agencies Association of India and the Ad Club of India, bodies of which all the agencies are members.
So, in a way, dear complainers, you would have made the decision, whatever the decision may be.
But that’s not the point of the post.
The buzz and the conversation is about the awards which have been withdrawn or now hang in the balance. No one is talking about why and how this happened and the impact of the scandal (yes, it is one) on the industry.
Why and how this happened?
It was a disaster waiting to happen. It’s like living in Tokyo; you know that you live on a fault-line and that an earthquake is a possibility every single day.
The Abbys has been beset by problems for more than five years, with each year being more controversial than the previous one. All the rubbish we’re talking about now – the scams and the copying – have ‘trended’ each year amongst adlanders as we approached the award season. The problem first affected both the creative and media Abbys, but the difference was that the CEOs of the media agencies foresaw the danger and took corrective action. The media awards are now scam-free and cheating-free, and there is no reason why the creative awards should not also be so.
It isn’t scam-free and cheating-free because powers that be in the creative agencies found it convenient to game the system and profit from it – and profit from it they have. So each year, we’ve been seeing work that we’ve never seen before being rewarded with the most prestigious awards, and no one objects. It gets worse when patent scam work goes on to be recognised at Cannes, at the Cleos, at Spikes, at The One Show. Somehow, winning at these awards shows made scam ‘right’.
No. It didn’t. It is just that the creative agencies found it a convenient justification.
Not one piece of work that has been created to solve business problems of brands, real work, has been under any controversy – not even of copying.
Every single ad that is either cancelled or reviewed is a scam ad. Every single one. That’s NOT a coincidence. Because if you had created a scam ad for solving a business problem, your client would never have approved of the release. If you had cheated, you would have been caught as soon as it appeared in a (reasonably circulated) newspaper or magazine or a popular TV channel or radio station, or had been painted on a hoarding in a major city.
Not this year – no real work has been caught in a controversy in the last so many years. There should have been a lesson here. There was – and the creative agencies, in the majority, chose to ignore the lesson.
The impact of the scandal
Outsiders are stunned to hear of the cheating. Clients are stunned to hear of the cheating. In one fell swoop, the respect for advertising has plummeted to a shocking low. We’ve had resignations at the highest levels in one agency and at one advertiser.
It’ll take time (and demonstrated action) to repair the damage to the reputation of the advertising industry as a whole.
That’s not all the impact. Advertising keeps complaining about the lack of talent that the business is attracting. How will students from the best communication and business schools now view a career in this industry – an industry where the largest and most reputed companies (and their senior professionals) are seen as cheats? How will the families of those caught up in this mess see them? How will their friends and their peers see them?
There is considerable damage that has been done, and rather than worry about an award or two that has been deservedly lost, worry about how to first stem the rot and then build credibility all over again.
And to those who threaten to pull out of the Abbys if the awards are cancelled, good riddance. The awards do not need scam and plagiarism, they need outstanding work created to solve the real problems of real products and services.
And to those who are so concerned about the loss of an award or two, spare a thought for the real heroes, those who won awards for real work for real brands, but who have been forgotten because the scams and the rip-offs grabbed the headlines that were rightfully theirs.
Shame.
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