Steve Harris wades into the scam debate
The Brand Agency’s MD Steve Harris has a nice half page column in The West today tackling what he sees is a growing trend to chase creative awards (see article on left).
Compared to the rest of the world it’s actually not a big problem. And it’s all been said before. Many times.
For the sake of a discussion I would disagree with one of Steve’s closing thoughts – “It places us at risk of becoming an industry that knows how to win awards, but doesn’t understand how to create work that sells a product”.
Firstly, we’re actually not very good at winning awards.
Secondly, I’m sure if that was the case with any creative in Perth then that person would quickly find themselves out the door.
In Asia, Middle East, South America and Europe there are many agencies that employ star creative teams almost solely to work on initiative creative opportunities. But in Perth we don’t have the budgets to indulge this.
And, as a general observation, creatives in Perth today are not as ‘hungry’ for awards as their counterparts around the world. Or, for that matter, as hungry as creatives who worked here in Perth during the late 80s and throughout the 90s. (by Kim Shaw)
33 Comments
Hahahahaha! This is coming from the agency that did Enjo, Galleria Toyota, Perth Zoo and the list goes on.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
“Secondly, I’m sure if that was the case with any creative in Perth then that person would quickly find themselves out the door.”
Is he delusional? So why when so many time this has happened that the creatives weren’t walked out the door?!
So lets get this straight, whilst Brand were winning awards at various events over the past few years, Steve was obviously at home watching old episodes of the Bill?
In truth he was probably on the dance floor after numerous glasses of champers patting his team on the back.
So Steve we all look forward to the Brand NOT putting work into any future awards.
More for us then…..
And yes we’ll be watching closely to make sure you follow through.
Steve Harris doing an article in the west about scam that ultimately promotes
the Brand??? Brilliant Steve welco
E to the scam hall of shame
Earth calling Steve! Earth calling Steve! Reality check Steve. Either you have:
A. selective memory loss (ditto to 1.27pm & 2.45pm)
B. are trying to stir the pot
C. fibbing
Look forward to seeing the next award entry submission for the Dockers as a not-for-profit. They must be worthy of charity status. Their cupboard is still bare.
Maybe Steve’s article was aimed more at his creative department than at the industry as a whole.
How are creatives expected to proceed? When the worth of a creative is judged nationally and internationally by the award winning work they have done, do you expect them to stop trying?
Your article isn’t going to change the international status quo, so either make a stand and stop entering awards as an agency, or allow your creatives to do their job and work on their careers; if you don’t I doubt they’ll be around for long.
As a creative working in Perth, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Attempt to do ‘real’ creative work day in, day out, and you’ll be seen as problematic (if your client/agency is very adverse to anything remotely narrative-based or non-retail) or someone who tries very hard, but needs to accept the realities of the market when you finally ‘grow up’ (if your client/agency means well but realistically has no approval mechanisms or funds in place to allow world-class innovative advertising to grow).
Do ‘scammy’ or ‘proactive’ work and you’re seen as flaky, opportunistic and likely to hit the tarmac in Sydney or Melbourne at the slightest provocation.
Kim, it’s not just that we’re not as ‘hungry’ as some of the 90s model creatives (but let’s not get too nostalgic here, I’ve heard a similar level of bitching for a loooong time now), but a lot of us are trying to keep our heads above water and are actually trying to build longterm careers in Perth, working under senior staff with very similar views to what we read here in the West.
What would you have us do?
Any jobs going?
Can Brand now enter this article in The West’s Caxton Creative Exercise for Newspaper Advertising?
I like scam ads. How is a creative supposed to build their portfolio without them?
Donnie Blanko – precisely.
Now waiting for the inevitable “Try doing award winning work for real clients” comment.
Did Elephant art get one extra person into the zoo – of course not. Did it make one cent for the agency – of course not. Did it make a couple of individuals feel good about themselves for a few days – of course it did. Wake up. Clients don’t give a shit. Awards are all about individuals trying to increase their salary and standing in a very shallow industry, not to mention stroking insecure egos. Clients will start to demand their agencies are putting their efforts into increasing their bottom line NOT the bottom lines of creatives. Harris needs to wake up. It’s his agency that keeps entering scammy stuff in all sorts of crazy awards shows all around the world – must be costing him a fortune and for what???
The sad thing is, a whole bunch of punters will read this article and think that the Brand Agency is a fine upstanding member of Perth’s corporate community!
Generally speaking, if you can do award winning work you can pump out the everyday work that sells given the right guidance. Besides, scam helps brain-dead clients understand what it is we do best.
Please answer this Mr Harris. What did you hope to achieve with that article?
Is it designed to convince your future, or current clients, that you can see through the ‘awards bullshit’? And that the service you give them is totally focused on results? Not pandering to your greedy, award-hungry creatives?
Is it to convince your clients that The Brand won’t end up like Marketforce, too focused on awards and not dedicated enough to the real work?
Or are you really having a go at your creatives? Implying that the rise in awards lately must mean they are not focused enough on the boring day-to-day stuff that pays the bills? They should be happy to just get on with their land release work and stop doing what you perceive as scams?
What’s your real motivation here? Because you’re not telling us anything new. Everyone knows most awards are won for proactive work. It’s been like that for decades. And let’s not get confused, proactive work, approved and paid for by the client that actually ran (more than once) is not scam. It might not have been for a real brief, but it is a real ad, ‘scam ads’ are fake. There is a difference.
In the real world, with real (fkn small) budgets and hesitant (shit-scared) clients, it’s almost impossible to win awards. Sad, but true. So, if awards make salaries, reputations etc, what do you expect creatives to do?
Clients pay the invoices of agencies and therefore the wages of creatives by generating revnue as a result of selling products or services. Award winning work is nice but it doesn’t pay the bills and it doesn’t affect a single person outside of this ‘world revolves around me’ industry. I read Steve’s article and found it facinating, informative and educational, up until now I thought a PADC was something to do with scuba diving.
Have fun boys and girls, keep massaging those egos and don’t stand too close to the exit unless sales are up.
what a crazy discussion…awards for advertising??? WTF Now I’ve heard it all. It’s advertising people. It’s that yucky stuff that everyone hates. Awards for musicians, yes. Awards for real writers, yes (novelists). Awards for actors, artists, poets, film directors even architects and journalists…but awards for people who make ads…now I’ve heard it all. What next, an award for the best real estate agent or used car salesman?
A passing illusion, awards are.
11:31 Creative awards are not about stroking a couple of individuals egos. The pressure within agencies for creatives to win awards is crushing.
If a creative does not win an award at the PADCs, he’s not thanked for the nights he spent on your land client – he’s asked, “what the hell happened?”
If he goes a few seasons without awards, he becomes that guy – the one who gets cut when someone feels the ned for a creative shake-up (usually after doing badly at an award show). All for just getting on with it, doing his best to make those land ads.
‘Award ads’ aren’t done at the expense of other ads, there’s no time for that. Have you ever seen the desk of a creative in Perth? It’s not unusual to have 5 briefs on the go on any day, all due the same afternoon. Award ads aren’t even done while your wife is putting the kids to bed – because you’re still at work, getting all of your briefs done.
Kim – you say Perth creatives aren’t hungry. Creatives in Sydney aren’t working on 8 retail briefs, a major rebrand for the agency’s newest client and the 3rd rebrief of another major campaign due by the end of the day.
Add an MD who truly doesn’t believe that creativity sells better than a starburst.
Now factor in that pressure to somehow get awards anyway.
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.
Another great example of Steve Harass doing what he does best: harass.
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 f*#k Mr Harris, I say, before Mr Harris f*#ks you.
9.54.
You’ve got Perth Advertising spot on. Well done. The only thing you didn’t factor in was the CD who runs his department like an old european royal court, channelling the best briefs to his favoured courtesans and letting the rest of the department eat retail and land sales cake. For the unlucky many, the Caxton Competition has become the only way to get anything half decent out in the year – for which Les, The West and CB should all be applauded.
Hang on Lads, I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for scam ads
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 there or somewhere else.
Here endeth this rant.
Nice to see someone (3:15) finally honouring those parasitic passengers who live off the rest of us.
Phil, you are spot on. A point well made and well overdue. I just hope Steve has enough sense to seriously consider what you’ve written. It’s pretty important.
Some great writing here, most of it better than Steve’s article, must be a few disillusioned copywriters out there!
So I don’t come off as a suit-hating bigot, I do need to point out that there are few, very few, exceptions to the rule. These people are true thinkers who happen to work in a particular department, and they add immeasurable value to what we do.
Unfortunately the majority who work in said department have no passion or ability, and it’s a great shame. They contribute far more to the negativity of this industry than any scammy award-show entry, bad brief or negative blog comment ever will.
Never heard anyone complaining about Mother London’s output, I think we could all learn lessons there.
Hey Steve, this is your chance to reply to the comments above.
I would seriously like to know how your agency is going to approach award shows from here on in and how you can defend your agency for the zoo elephant ads and the jazz club posters.
Steve’s too busy laughing to reply to these comments and once he calms down his next move will not be to explain, it will be to downsize the department – which is the very reason he wrote the article. The fundamental flaw with you creatives is once you mastered playing checkers you thought you knew it all, but you’re being outplayed by a very good chess player.