The Brand Agency, Perth managing director Steve Harris wades into the scam debate out west
April 21 2011, 3:35 pm | | 13 Comments
The Brand Agency, Perth’s managing director Steve Harris had a half page column in The West Australian yesterday tackling what he sees is a growing trend to chase creative awards.
The response from the WA industry has been swift – mainly on the lines of: Pot. Kettle. Black.
13 Comments
Who’s the brand agency? Never heard of them.
Mr Harris is of course right.
Scam ads suck away any pretense this industry has of showing that great creative ads work better than shit ads. Even though I devoutly believe they do.
Rewarding scam ads makes it obvious that we don’t believe in ourselves. That we are lazy. That we can’t hack it in the real world.
I’m sorry prima donnas, but what we do is supposed to be hard. That’s why we get big money.
It is supposed to be hard to think of good ideas for real briefs, otherwise your pet monkey could do them. It is even harder to make good ads for good clients that they will buy, otherwise cheap crap agencies could do them.
It is harder still to make good ads for bad clients that they buy and suddenly become famous overnight. That’s why Old Spice should have won the Grand Prix last year, and will this year.
That’s what separates good agencies from bad.
What Mr Harris fails to mention, of course, is that his agency is complicit. They have won awards recently for work of the same reality as those he accuses. I have no doubt those awards are still prominently displayed around the agency.
As he he rightly points out, the major international award (Cannes) is a behemoth that thrives on the insecurity and vanity of agencies and clients. It is horrifically expensive to enter, the judging is generally biased, and no-one remembers the ads that win after a week.
But, as he again points out, Cannes is a private profit-making enterprise. It has gone from a quaint show for TV ads hanging off the back of the Cannes Film Festival to the most prestigious award in the world because we (as an industry) think it is cool to go to Cannes in June.
But there is your leverage, Mr Harris.
Don’t enter. If you don’t enter they go broke, or they change. Why do you think Cannes is now all about digital and integrated? Just by opening that door they tripled entries.
So close it, Mr Harris. Don’t enter.
Don’t enter any for-profit award. Stick to your guns. D&AD, One Show, AWARD. Or none. Show that good work doesn’t need to be awarded. It is just good.
Donate your entry fees to a worthy cause, or to hiring a worthy person.
My agency is spending $50,000 to enter an award (Cannes) that is a self-evident wank. The ads we are entering are all real, and all have worked well enough we will be entering them in Effectiveness Awards. But our pandering to the hype makes me gag.
Worse, it makes it harder to sell good ads to real clients for real briefs. Scam ads plant the seed in the minds of our clients that we do not have their interests at heart, but that we have ours.
Change the business Mr Harris.
Do great work. And then don’t enter it into awards.
Let is speak for itself.
I don’t give a fuck about pots, kettles and their various shades of K.
What I do care about is spurious science, the subjective use of quote marks and the general look-down-your-nose and that-couldn’t-be-right attitude of some adman that reckons he knows the difference between what merely wins and what’s “effective” (quote marks used here for ironic effect only).
You are ten years behind the debate.
award shows are quite strict on scam ads these days. good luck Mr. Harris. You will do well.
“A growing trend”? Where the fuck has he been for the past 15 years?
Mr Harris, being both a suit and agency owner is the enemy. He is there to crush your dreams, limit your career opportunities and ultimately, keep you plodding away on rubbish to his financial advantage for as long as possible. If he’s lucky you will gather an expensive mortgage, wife and kids along the way that will further tie you to his enterprise and profit. You, by contrast are young and lithe, in the prime of your creativity. Your hunger for recognition and fame among your peers is potent and drives you to take risks, cut corners and bend the rules in the relentless pursuit of self-aggrandisement. It’s your ticket out or your lift upstairs. Take it in both hands and fuck Mr Harris, I say, before Mr Harris fucks you.
Wow, 11:14PM, I’m impressed: you’ve got a pet monkey?
He’s right of course, and as others have noted with surprising eloquence for this largely illiterate blog, just a smidge hypocritical while his agency chases award glory. As one blogger so astutely observed, this is hardly a new debate or a revelation. Trying to stop awards now, however, would be like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Hey, hang on, I wouldn’t where I am today if it wasn’t for scam ads, sorry I mean awards
While there are notable exceptions, our industry employs a large proportion of people with no qualifications, no experience and generally no idea about how to create great advertising let alone what great advertising is.
For some reason their opinions on creative carry more weight than the creative director.
Have a look around and you’ll see them. They’re the naysayers, the complainers, the backstabbers, the emotional blackmailers, the whiners, the bullies. They’re quite often bipolar, switching between the flirtatious histrionic and the tantrum throwing behemoth. They’ll go over peoples heads, behind their backs or barge straight through them to get their way. And god-forbid, if a creative says ‘I love it, but I really don’t think that adds to this idea’ the creative will be strung up and told they are ‘difficult to deal with’ simply for stating their professional opinion.
They kill great work with ‘I think the client…’, ‘I don’t think the client…’, ‘We need to make this more obvious’ and ‘We need to add’ before work even gets to the client, where it inevitably goes through the same dumbing-down process again.
The worst thing is they aren’t even paid to think, and although there are incredibly talented exceptions to the rule, generally their thinking only serves to confuse and irritate.
They weasel their way into senior positions without having produced a single piece of great work under their watch, simply for their ability to kiss the clients ass while failing to persuade them to provide a decent budget, timeline, brief or hunger for great work.
If you confronted one with this fact, they’d moan that it is the clients fault, producers fault or the creatives fault, but never ever theirs. Experts at shifting blame, they come off rosy while the creatives and clients look like assholes.
They also forget who we’re actually supposed to be selling to, and it’s not the client.
There are agencies that have managed to do extremely well without these people. And they win awards on most of their ‘real briefs’ for ‘real clients’.
It’s about time MDs and GMs look at how people are contributing to their overall culture, and define exactly what a persons role is within the agency. If winning awards is important for your agency, make it happen on real briefs. If you can’t put the right people in place to do that (and no, it’s not the creative department), don’t complain if the creatives want to scam it up.
It’s natural for a good creative to want to do great work, and if you’re not providing the opportunities, they’ll create them, either their or somewhere else.
Here endeth this rant.
Dave Trott has just written a very good piece in his blog on this very subject, and it should be compulsory reading. Quote:
“We don’t have to enter other people’s award schemes.
We can make up our own.
In fact, look at this.
While I’m sitting here I’ve just heard I’ve won the “I Fancy a Cuppa” award.
And look, later on I’m up for the prestigious “Popping Down The Pub” award.
After that, I’m going to enter the “What’s On The Telly” award.
And you know what?
I’ve got a sneaking feeling I’ll win.”
http://www.cstadvertising.com/blog/2011/04/were-not-selling-were-selling-selling/
Nice to see someone (6:12) finally honouring those parasitic passengers who live off the rest of us.
6:12 – Nicely written. Thanks.