Saatchi & Saatchi New York was caught winning Bronze at Cannes this year for a campaign its client never asked for, sending shockwaves through the industry.
Department store JCPenney was incensed that Saatchi posted the racy ad – which it hadn’t approved – on YouTube. None-theless, the agency was awarded by Cannes for the scam.
Back in Australia, the industry is rife with whispers that at least two Australian agencies had also won metal at Cannes off the back of scam ads.
JWT’s Olympus “Binoculars” campaign, which won Silver in Outdoor and Gold in Press, along with DDB Sydney’s Hasbro campaign, which earned the agency Bronze in Press, were outed by bloggers and gossips as nothing more than scam ads.
Is our creative community slipping back into a scam culture?
Olympus marketing manager Lisa Forest does not take too kindly to suggestions JWT’s “Binoculars” ad was a scam. But rather than deny the allegations, Forest refuses to “speculate” on why the industry has singled out the “Binoculars” ad, nor is she willing to divulge details of the campaign’s media plan.
The campaign has run across a range of print media, including sports, music press, travel titles and transit media, since April.
But was the ad campaign a response to an Olympus brief? And did Olympus approve the creative? Who paid for the media placement – Olympus or JWT?
Forest says Olympus’s “close partnership” with JWT and “internal processes” were a matter of intellectual property and therefore confidential.
Forest also did not comment on speculation three of JWT’s agency staff were models in the campaign. JWT did not return calls on the matter.
Hasbro is also in the firing line – why did an ad for a toy brand appear in AFR Boss magazine? Why did it have such a limited media schedule?
“Hasbro supports 40 brands and doesn’t have a lot of money to support individual brands, so it’s not a massive campaign,” DDB executive creative director Matt Eastwood claims.
Whether it’s a scam or not, the rumours have sparked fresh debate over the effects of scam ads and what constitutes a scam in the first place.
Eastwood admits DDB often approaches clients pro-actively with creative ideas, but insists that doesn’t make the resulting work a scam.
“We encourage all creative and account guys to come up with ideas for clients. If they [the client] don’t want it, they don’t have to do it,” he says. “That’s our job, to stimulate them with creative ideas as often as we can.
“Creative staff all have a list of clients next to them, and we say, if you ever get a couple of spare hours come up with an idea, put it to them. I don’t think people should mistake pro-active ideas for scam ads – it’s part of doing a good job for your client.”
But that’s where clients have a bone to pick.
“There’s no justification for the use of client money or its brands for funding agency self-promotion,” says Collin Segelov, executive director of peak client body Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA).
He says no case has been brought to the AANA’s attention in recent history, but that the board would be prepared to “respond” should that change.
“Responsible advertising, which is key to the continuance of self-regulation, requires ethical practices by advertisers and their agencies. It’s hard to see so-called ‘scam ads’ fitting that requirement.
“Some marketers like to be associated with award-winners, others don’t regard it as important. Certainly awards are going to lose any real credibility if the ‘scam ad’ practice isn’t knocked on the head,” says Segelov.
He points out that the AANA recently partnered with the Advertising Federation of Australia (AFA) to bring the Effies to the fore in Australia, while continuing to support the effectiveness-focused MFA Awards.
Lowe Group Australasia CEO Stephen Pearson agrees, saying awards that ignore the results of work and instead focus on creativity alone, are dragging the industry’s name down.
“Pure creative awards are the road to hell for the ad industry, because it makes clients wonder, when they are presented with work that’s being sold so hard, whether it’s truly for them, or a self-serving thing for the agency,” says Pearson.
“From a personal point of view, I think awards that are more like the Effies, where there’s a com-bination of creativity and strategy, where there is a degree of difficulty and finally results, are a much more desirable thing to win.”
If fact, Pearson says he’d rather win an Effie than a Lion at Cannes any day: “That’s a personal opinion and not one that is held by all people at Lowe Sydney or Lowe internationally.”
But the problem with scams goes much further than award ceremonies alone.
Some clients say creatives who have built their reputation on scam ads are impotent when dealing with “real world” business problems – especially in more competitive industries such as finance and telecommunications.
Virgin Mobile brand & com-munications manager Dave Cain says as agencies progress to placing higher impetus on hiring award-winning creatives, those staff run the very real risk
of “performance anxiety” when they are offered a real brief by a tough client.
“I see plenty of amazing work at concept stage, which is diluted beyond recognition by the legal landscape,” says Cain. “I see very little point in awarding an ad that hasn’t gone through this rigour, and the only way to truly test rigour, is by putting it to market, with clients’ dollars and real business objectives.”
BankWest chief marketing officer David Morgan agrees, and says experienced marketers will quickly lose patience with agencies that are more focused on self-promotion than on delivering effective campaigns.
“The concern is whether the agency resource and client fees are being used inappropriately – it costs a lot of time and effort to drive [scam] work, and surely that’s time and effort best spent driving their client’s brand, not their own,” Morgan says.
Honda Australia’s John Pranger says scam ads ultimately under-mine the relationship between a client and agency.
“The reality is the agency and the client are a team, and clients and boards today are not going
to be impressed by being mis-represented in the public domain,” Pranger says.
Stamping out the culture that breeds scam ads, however, is no easy task. Scam ads have a rich and colourful history in Australia. Many of today’s top creatives built their reputations on what would today be considered a disdainful practice.
One commentator claims Dave Droga, founder of Droga5, built his early career off churning out scam ads. “He won in the early ’90s for a Swiss deli in Glebe, but even at that time everyone knew the guy was going straight to the top.”
Arguably the most notorious scam ad in recent history was created by well-known creative Marc Schattner, then at Lowe Lintas. Schattner won metal at Cannes in 2000 for his Taronga Zoo campaign. The only problem was Taronga Zoo wasn’t even a client of Lowe Lintas at the time.
One industry observer recalls the reaction: “Lionel Hunt, who was at Lintas at the time, called [Schattner] in and said: ‘Pack your bags, you’re out of here.’ He was so big at the time in creative terms, but it was one of those secrets that no one talks about, the elephant
in the room.”
Many of today’s creative dir-ectors are eager to see the back of the practice.
“Scams are an ugly stain on our industry,” says BMF executive creative director Warren Brown, whose agency is no stranger to creative awards.
“The lure of awards won by cheap shots seems to be more powerful than actually creating work that adds value to a client’s business,” he says.
“It’s particularly sad to see promising young creative talent deluded into thinking that they’re doing a good job by producing scams, when the commercial reality is they’re next to useless if they’re unable to understand
a client’s business and the challenges they face to help build a brand,” Brown says.
Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder of independent Sydney agency The Glue Society, says the practice is an ingrained part of creative culture.
“It’s a selfish business at the end of day and ultimately people have egos that need to be fuelled,” says Kneebone.
“It’s a game that has been embedded by the industry that’s contributing to a lack of innov-ation, and it’s not paying attention to the real world, which is about creating work for clients that delivers real results.”
However, not everyone presents such a hard line against a practice that can be seen as a good way to get the creatives buzzing about a client’s brand.
Colin Watts, seasoned creative director at Jack Watts Currie, takes a more easygoing stance on the issue, but says scam ads none-theless reveal underlying problems within agencies.
“I think a lot of [the backlash against scam ads] is jealousy, with people thinking: ‘I wish I’d done that’, so they say: ‘That’s not a real client.’ But, to me, I say hats off to those who do great creative,” says Watts.
AWARD school, for one, even has a special award night, Pie Night, dedicated to the practice.
“However, if an agency has to produce scam ads to keep its creatives happy and win awards, then maybe there’s something wrong with the system,’ Watts adds. “Why aren’t they doing that work for real clients?”
DDB’s Matt Eastwood says scam ads are something of the past, prevalent in “the old days”, but no longer an issue in Australia.
“I personally don’t think it’s a big deal anymore. There’s always a lot of criticism of Asia, and it’s still happening there, but I certainly don’t see it as big issue confronting the industry [here].”
Regardless, scam ads will continue to be a tempting outlet for creative departments frustrated by the sight of the potentially award-winning material that clients invariably send to the cutting room floor.
The AFA, which represents the interests of creative agencies, is not about to step in to put a stop to the practice.
AFA executive director Mark Champion says there’s very little it can do and that it’s up to creative awards to organise their entry guidelines and judging procedures as they see fit.
“Our view is that the principle of entering scam ads into awards is not healthy and organisers should be as vigilant as possible to ensure that scam ads don’t make it into awards,” Champion says.
“However, it must be acknowledged that this is sometimes extremely difficult to achieve – especially for a massive award program such as Cannes.”
No doubt the debate will rage for as long as there are awards focusing on creative ideas. <
What’s a scam ad, anyway?
Strictly speaking, the definition of a scam ad is when an agency runs an ad for a client it does not have. But, while that practice has been virtually stamped out, these days scam ads can be considered as ads where an agency has paid for the campaign’s media schedule, or the client did not approve the ad to run.
Adopting a harsher line, Lowe Group Australasia CEO Stephen Pearson defines a scam ad as one created for the sole purpose of winning an award.
“I just think it’s crap. I know that it technically gets people an award and steps them up the creative ladder, but how they live with themselves as being proud of it, I don’t know,” Pearson says.
DDB executive creative director Matt Eastwood says people can be under the misapprehension of what scam ads are, and considers pro-active work part of the job of the agency.
“I don’t know what other people’s definition of a scam ad is, but we do a lot of pro-active work for our clients – that’s part of the job of having clients,” he says.
Virgin Mobile brand & communications manager Dave Cain says the industry could do with shining up the “scam ad” image, starting with the name.
“The best place to start is to define what role it is they play,” Cain suggests. “If it is about exploring future communication possibilities, then perhaps call them ‘Edison Ads’, and develop and judge them on that basis.
“But it goes without saying they should be created in consultation with the agency planner, approved by the brand, be true to its essence, and there must exist the real potential for their future execution in a campaign roadmap,” Cain says.
“Then enter them into awards.”
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