Should AWARD follow The One’s Show’s lead?
As reported earlier,following the controversy surrounding DDB Brazil’s ‘9/11’ Ad, The OneClub has decided to implement what they believe to be the moststringent and thorough fake ads policy in the advertising world.
TheOne Show is calling on other international award shows to follow suitwith similar policies and calls on our industry as a whole to end thepractice of fake advertising.
As the AWARD juries are all currently in Sydney, now seems the perfect time to discuss this issue:
Should AWARD follow suit in this region, which comprises New Zealand, Australia and south-east Asia? Should AXIS do likewise? Should the rules be as stringent as those adopted by The One Show?
For 2010 and onwards, the One Show will be adopting the following new rules and penalties.
1. An agency or regional office of an agency network that enters an admade for nonexistent clients, or an ad made or run without a client’sapproval, will be banned from entering The One Show for 5 years.
2. The entire team credited on the fake entry will be banned from entering the One Show for 5 years.
3. An agency or regional office of an agency network that enters an adthat has run once, on late night TV, or has only run because the agencyproduced a single ad and paid to run it themselves*, will be bannedfrom entering The One Show for 3 years.
*The One Club reserves the right to review late-night, ran-once andlaunch versions at their discretion. If it is determined that the adwas created expressly for award show entry, the penalty will hold.
THE IMPACT ON ASIA
Not only are scam ads the target of a crackdown by the New York One Show but the one-off, media paid but theagency entries will also be targeted. This will have a massive impacton entries from Asia. It is the second part of the One Club’s statement that willhave a widespread impact on Asia’s metal performance at the awards show.
Tobe fair, very few entries from Asia run without a client approval ofsome kind. They are always signed off by a client or, at the veryleast, the owner of a store that retails that product. However, The OneClub statement also targets ads that are created expressly for awardshow entry and the creators of these entries face 3 year bans.
It is this part of the One Club statement that will be of most interest to agencies in Asia.
Anagency or regional office of an agency network that enters an ad thathas run once, on late night TV, or has only run because the agencyproduced a single ad and paid to run it themselves*, will be bannedfrom entering The One Show for 3 years.
* The One Clubreserves the right to review ‘late-night, ran-once’ and launchversions, at The One Club’s discretion. If it is determined that the adwas created expressly for award show entry, the penalty will hold.
Now everyone knows as well as CB Asia that thisaccounts for around 90% of all print entries from Asia to The One Show.As well as any other international awards show. And, to be fair, thisalso accounts for a large percentage of entries from other parts of theworld like South America, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Australiaand New Zealand.
You only have to take a very quick look through the Pencil winners from last year’sOne Show to realise the impact this decision will have. Draw a lineright the way through all those karate school entries, the restaurantads, those ice-cream ads, the bookshop ads, those detergent ads withthe product in the bottom right hand corner, the whole public servicecategory. All those ads where you got a friendly photographer andretoucher to donate their time and the agency paid (or negotiated) for the ads to runin bus shelters or in IS and Timeout magazine and the like. Gone.
Andthe impact goes further – every Thai or Chinese print awards entry thatuses English language for the headline or copy would now be ineligiblebecause these are obviously ads and campaigns that are “tidied up” forentry to awards.
It’scertainly a brave decision for any awards show to make – especially inthis economic environment. It could be argued that the huge publicitythat this ad has created over the past two weeks has forced The One Show’shand. But with all award shows already looking ataround 35-40% overall reductions in entries this is bound to furtherreduce entries to The One Show. Two prominent ECDs that Campaign Brief Asiaspoke to over the weekend publicly welcomed The One Show decision, butprivately agreed that they believed many networks would probably justdecide to skip all entries to The One Show this year to not only avoid anyrisk of public humiliation but, equally, to appease Chief FinancialOfficers who have decimated their budgets for award entries.
It’s going to be fascinating to watch how this all plays out over the next six months.
7 Comments
Should have happened 20 years ago. Enter something that the client didn’t buy and pay to run, it’s not advertising, it’s art. We’re not in the art business.
who cares, 80% of the advertising in award annuals of the 90’s and 00’s is scamish, the old run once in beirut trick. A good idea should be awarded for being a good idea. Is being quick to label something a scam just our own insecurity or jealously of not thinking of it first? Is getting something through the myriad of pimple faced marketing kids/wankers really the ultimate test for your idea? And let’s not forget the six weeks of research at the hands of bogans after a free drink. Much of this stuff didn’t really exists prior to the 90’s. Besides aren’t all the careers of our CD’s and ECD’s built off of these exact ad’s? Most can’t deny they’ve won a few accolades from what The One Club now considers scam ads. The One Club shouldn’t be blaming the ‘run once culture’ for their mistake in awarding a insensitive and rather shit advert, they should blame the judges.
Oh for fuck’s sake, too many people are so naive on this. One Show only put their foot down because it’s NYC based, and this scam ad just happens to be based around 9/11. They were forced to act, not to save us all from the nasty scammers, but because 9/11 is such a taboo subject over there. Most award shows are businesses. Owned by people who run them as such. They make money from us. Lots of money. And there’s no way in hell they’ll go out of their way to do anything that will hurt their bottom line. Awards shows work just fine, just the way they are. If not, why do the numbers of entries keep rising every single year? Now, AWARD is not-for-profit, so they may approach this a little differently to a Cannes, for example. But they’d want to have a very fucking solid business plan for keeping their award show afloat with 70% less entries for a few years. Because if they genuinely got serious about this, we all know what would happen. I’d love it if they did, but you’ll also have to recruit judges without blood on their hands, which won’t be easy, will it? I’m surprised clients don’t take a lead on this actually. Look at the Effies: not a single scam in sight. If clients came out and said they’d make success at Effies a key criteria in agency selection and agency retention, and said “we don’t give a shit about the Gunn Report”, then I reckon things would change. But the status quo is powerful, and too many people don’t want it to change. Because for the people at the top of the tree, it works just fine. Scam ads win you awards, make you money, push up your ranking. Agency people who complain about the lack of integrity at shows need to look a bit closer to home: stop rewarding people on the basis of awards won with dubious work, and the dubious work will disappear. Yeah, it’s that simple really.
Yes
If they do – NZ’s going to have a poor showing at AWARD.
Absolutely YES.
Nothing to do with the 9/11 ad. Everything to do with scam should not be allowed.
So YES, AWARD should follow.
I’d say you’re also naive on this. If you’ve spent any length of time in NY you’d know that 9/11 isn’t as a taboo subject as what you’d think. Sure you won’t win many mates with an ad like this in NY 8 years on – but it’s not as fire and brimstone as what the rest of the world would think it would be.