HEGARTY: SCAMS UNDERMINE AWARDS
March 12 2009, 12:30 pm | | 45 Comments
Sir John Hegarty, chairman and worldwide creative director, BBH, London, warns that scam advertising is a very serious problem, and if it continues, will undermine completely the value of awards and end up destroying them.
Hegarty, who received a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2007, is heading to Asia as the film jury president at AdFest 2009, taking place next week (March 19-21) in Thailand.
In an exclusive interview with Campaign Brief Asia, Hegarty likens scams to drugs at the Olympics as well as gives his views on the value of creativity in these hard economic times. Read the whole story on the CB Asia website.
45 Comments
whatever robert redford
Awards are totally undermined anyway. They are totally rigged and are all political in their operations.
Scam is bad. Anyone can write an award winning idea without a Client brief or mandatories.
On a disciplined creative can do it on a real job!
Sadly, most of the highly paid ‘sucessful’ folks, made their way via the scam.
Sure. Everyone says scam is bad. But you keep seeing people get good jobs on the back of it, because too many people get suckered in by numbers of shiny metal pieces, rather than the actual quality of the work.
If people could judge a book and reel by its content, rather than the list of awards up the front of it, it wouldn’t be a problem. But deciding FOR YOURSELF if something is good or not isn’t easy. You need to know good work from bad, and pretend from legit. This is something a lot of MD’s and agency CEO’s wouldn’t have a clue about, unfortunately. Some CD’s too.
And yes, yes, yes… I have a list of awards (80% legit, 20% scam), so spare me the ‘get back to your DL brochure you awardless hack’ response OK.
Scam bad. Adland’s reliance on numbers of awards as the sole indicator of a creatives worth… even worse.
I sit here playing Lego, chewing my Hubba Bubba and checking out chicks with my Zoom Binoculars, wondering what the fuck you guys are talking about?
I’ve actually enjoyed some of the hot sauce, backpacker hostel, dog obedience school ads of previous years. Breaks up the monotonous shite of the so-called legitimate winners who know a mate on a judging panel in most of the annuals you flick through.
2.03PM
I couldn’t agree more.
And yes, yes, yes, I have plenty of Awards also-100% legit.
2:03 – While I agree with your sentiments that too many are suckered in by shiny metal, your attitude that “nobody but creatives know good work” is exactly what perpetuates the situation. This basically then results in work being created to impress only the creative fraternity. This is hard to achieve with a real brief, hence the rise of scamming.
Truly great work should speak for itself, regardless of the audience.
DDBoom!
2.17pm
…while reading the local Manly newspaper.
I bet Hegarty never did anything like that
Can’t beat them, join them.
3.08
The funny thing is, I bet he never has.
2.59, what gives you the impression I think that ‘nobody but creatives know good work”?
I said that MANY CEO’s and MD’s don’t know how to judge a book/reel. Which is true. And I mentioned them specifically, because they’re the people hiring the ECD’s… often on the back of the sort of work Hegarty is talking about.
I also mentioned that some CD’s are overly reliant on award tallies, because they don’t have the confidence to hire someone on their ideas, as opposed to their list of metal.
Fact is, it’s fucking hard to judge what’s good and what isn’t, and most people take the easy way out by falling back on other people’s opinion. In other words, if it won something, and I don’t like it, there’s something wrong with ME, and not the work.
That’s why awards are so important.
If it’s an effective scam ad, what’s the problem?
There are plenty of scam ads out there that have actually generated good response rates – and revenue – for non-clients/charities. And in some cases, those non-clients have become paying clients.
4:18
But if the judging is all messed up by the pack-mentality, as you’ve said, doesn’t your argument that awards are important fall over?
The whole scam industry is like a little side show. It’s creatives doing ads for other creatives instead of doing ads to sell products, which is why the whole industry exists.
But we keep rewarding these ads that no one has ever seen. Everyone knows which CDs shamelessly play the game and keep doing ‘print campaigns ‘ that never run. But the industry ( CBrief included) continues to laud this work.
The system rewards people who know how to cheat the system, and as long as it does nothing will change. None of the festivals are strict b/c less entries = less dosh for them. Not that hard to police it really – for press you have to enter the actual ad torn out of the paper.
And yes I have done it and won it, but only b/c it means you move up the ranks.
Anyway fuck it, whatareyougonnado?
Define Scam.
Scam sucks, no doubt about it. However there is a huge difference between ‘scam’ and being ‘pro-active’.
We have a client who have no idea what a great brand they have, and how creative they can be. Its taken us being pro-active to push them into an area of now accepting great work and interesting briefs
Now as for the dog groomers, funeral parlours, lawn mower men…scam, scam, scam.
March 12 / 12.39pm
You win. Classic.
i think he might be right but does he need to be reminded about the scam that BBH has done over the years.
didn’t they win a pencil for a poster for a Taxi Driver Convention?
In fact every great agency has their fair share.
Fallon in it’s first years is best known for its ads for a local church.
Chiat for surfing alliance against pollution.
Crispin, DDB, Weiden they have all snuck a few away.
i guess the difference is they all do great work for real clients as well.
Creatives who do scam ads have no conscience.
But what the f__k?!?
As Tim Mellors once said, “It’s only advertising. Nobody gets killed.”
How about we have a special award section for them?
We could call it the “I promise this didn’t run once in the manly daily – or my client is a relative – it ran the size it was on the entry board – the agency didn’t fund or part fund it – i didn’t put it up in the agency lift to qualify it as OOH – nor i didn’t modify it to enter – I am not from asia or south america” award.
But they do deserve to be celebrated.
Cos, believe it or not, even scam ads aren’t easy to write.
Years ago they were easy to spot, they were in the copy section, usually beautifully crafted classified ads for a car or boat.
You could even win $100,000 with an ad for your dad.
Then the OOH category opened up a shit load of possibilities.
Then one lot hit pay dirt when they discovered monaco holdings.
Then….. well, it’s just such a mess now, lets just call everything a scam then we can get back to applauding good ideas, where ever they come from.
I DOUBT THIS WILL GET PRINTED.
Scam only exsists because of award tables.
Campaign Brief is the cause of a majority of scam in Asia.
It alone introduced this absurd points system into the industry.
Scam is far less relevant or needed in Europe because CB isn’t running tables there.
Until next time, happy scamming.
4:15am, Some fair points but you are very wrong about the Europe thing. I know that in Germany, scam ads are pretty much an industry in themselves.
That’s right 4.15. Blame CB for everyone else’s weaknesses.
Scam was rife in Asia long before CB even got there.
BTW the Gunn Report ranks on awards won, Creativity does too. As does every award show on the planet.
“… it’s fucking hard to judge what’s good and what isn’t”.
Really? The criteria is results, and therefore ROI for the client. That’s all we do – sell products for clients.
The awards that really count are the Effies and the Echoes, and I guess to some extent ADMA and AIMIA. The others, too often, just reward folks who know how to game the system.
Fair enough 2.21.
I guess if you were recruiting an ECD for your agency, and someone came in with a book and reel full of:
KFC adverts
Harvey Norman catalogues
A couple of Zoot TV Reviews
Six BrandPower spots he both wrote AND directed
And a hard-hitting radio campaign for Fantastic Furniture that said “A houseful of furniture for only $999 – That’s Fantastic!” four times in 30 seconds…
You’d let him run your creative department. Well, good luck with that one.
Spam, as with drugs, should be stopped at the source, not the end user.
Don’t attack the user, but the suppliers.
And that would be “The Production Companies”.
Well, I guess after this week’s earlier collective true confessions about those fat cat production companies who have all this money to make spam and get young teams hooked on creative they can never sell their clients, that’s not going to be a problem any more.
So vitriolic was that diatribe, I doubt whether they’ll ever fund another scam ad, a charity job, an award entry because the agency won’t or even a free lunch again, knowing what creatives really feel about production companies. And for a certain clique (and you know who you are), no more free drugs!
The irony is everybody is sick of hearing about the ’80s, but still everybody wishes they lived it. Why? Because everybody shared equally in the the work and the fun and excitement that went with it. There was no “us” or “them” and guess what? There was no SPAM!
i missed out by about a couple of decades. is it true that that north sydney used to be the hub of all the splurge. im thinking underbelly with notepads??
curious junya
I’m guessing you mean SCAM, and not SPAM.
But then, they’re both vaguely artificial constructs, fundamentally lacking real meat, and poor substitutes for the real thing. So maybe not.
COMMENTS LIKE THIS UNDERMINE SCAM
ECD who bought his house on it.
Come on people, get fucking real!
Scam wins the effective award for ‘overnight success’ in your career!
Hegarty has forgotten what it is like to be a shit kicker at a shit agency. Working at a place like JWT and trying to do good work on proper briefs for real clients is a ball-ache and a total gamble that rarely pays off. So the shit kicker does some scams to rise up the ladder. It is often the only way to get out of a dump agency. it is often the only way for a shit agency to get better and try win the clients that like good work.
I like SPAM. Mmmm, yummy.
THANK YOU, John. I am proud to work for your agency.
Scam is a scourge. And it’s getting easier and easier to do it for every category…some well known scammers have become more experts at making fake work than they are at what their real job should be (we all know who you are).
It’s equal to steroids in baseball and plagiarism for journalists. People use it to pad resumes, and it’s basically lying and cheating to get ahead of their peers. It’s not realistic work, and we should celebrate the people who not only create great creative work, but sell it through. If you’ve ever worked for a CD who’s built a career on scam, you’d see the damage they do to real clients and the agency.
Everyone knows the people in our industry who have built careers on this stuff, and many have turned a blind eye. I even know some nice people who have fallen into making it. I just hope more of us voice just how unacceptable it is, so the playing field is leveled and we get back to respecting those who make real work and make it great.
You idiots. Scam is rife in a bunch of industries.
The wine company that makes a special blend for the judges.
The restaurant that makes an extra effort for the critic.
The Hollywood studio that puts out the special movie for the shot at the Oscars.
Get with the program: awards are a measure of talent, but not necessarily business success. (Profit is the best measure of that.)
10.10
All the industries you mentioned are rife with scam, are in fact very tightly controlled to prevent it.
You’re so wrong, 10:10pm.
You’re just trying to make yourself feel better about your cheating. I, and many others I know, have won many major awards for very real, sometimes difficult clients. And we’ve worked with those who have cheated, and it’s like night and day. And we all know who they are.
Scam isn’t a measure of ‘talent’ at all. If you can’t come up with one of those typical award-winning scam ads without a brief in less than an hour, you probably aren’t very good at your job. They’re easy as pie. You want a challenge? Try selling them for once.
“Taxi Driver Convention” by BBH. D&AD (mid 1990s). It’s one of the greatest scam ads of all time.
Nice one John.
It’s not about awards, it’s about politics and winning business.
10.10 is absolutely right. I know for a fact the ‘wine industry ‘ does it. Restaurants do it 100%.
BBH does do scams.
And this is a PR article like Singo not entering awards was a PR exercise. How many idiots are on this blog??????
Well picked up, 3.09. That MiniCab ad that BBH did was one of the finest pieces of scam I’ve ever seen. Unless the MiniCab industry really engaged the services of an expensive agency such as BBH to advertise their annual general meeting, that is.
Won a silver D&AD too.
So I guess from Hegarty’s perspective, it’s ok for his agency to undermine the integrity of shows such as D&AD, but not ok for everyone else.
Or is it that scam was morally acceptable once, but not anymore?
Or maybe it was ok when only the early adopters were doing it, but now that scruffy people from Brazil and Singapore and New Zealand are doing it, it’s lost its shine?
Or perhaps John will track down those responsible for the ad, and hand back the silver pencil to whatever hyphenated geezer is running D&AD at the moment.
10.10 is 100% right. I worked for a major alcohol player for 3 years and we invented awards for most of their cheap shit wines.
Sticking a bronze shiny sticker on a bottle increases sales by 10%. Gold shiny stickers 40%. With 5% of consumers knowing nothing about proper wine awards and 98% of statistics made up on the spot, 30% of people reading this (4 people) know what I’m talking about.
Scammers are to losers. So sad that they are still being awarded. If they are as capable of what their award represents themselves, the agency should be doing pretty good at this point of time.
Ideas are everywhere, to boost up business Yes, to produce scams ha ha ha… you tell me.