shots 159: S is for Scams

There’s been plenty of brilliant advertising to celebrate over the past 25 years, but is the relentless pursuit of awards encouraging a darker side of the industry to flourish? Ben Kay, the copywriter behind If This Is A Blog, Then What’s Christmas? shines a light on the murky practice of scam advertising.

‘Scam’ is defined as a dishonest scheme. In that sense, much of what we call scam advertising is no such thing. Most of it simply looks for an advantage within the parameters of an awards contest, then exploits that advantage. There are very few ads that actually transgress those rules then hope not to be caught.

But when the ad industry uses the word, it generally refers to work that sits at the outer limit of the conditions of entry; not illegal as such, but consistent merely with the letter of the law rather than the spirit. That’s why you’ll find scam advertising all over the world and its practitioners able to deny producing any such thing.

I started working in advertising in 1996. Back then the word scam was unheard of, and yet scam ads did indeed exist: there were the two-minute director’s cuts that ran a few times “to qualify for awards”; the ads whose edit, grade or music were changed for the award entry version; the DPS with the phone number sliced off the entered proof. Nobody really cared about those practices, mainly because everyone was at it. They also provided the lucky people of planet Earth more perfect examples of what the rest of us could aim for, so where was the harm?

You’ve got to spin it to win it

Then a couple of things changed. One was the rise of the Gunn Report, which counted up the scores of an ad’s global awards and then declared a poster/copywriter/production company to be THE BEST. Suddenly there was an empirical measurement of an ad’s or agency’s creative ability, and that could then be used in creds meetings, which led to pitches, which led (hopefully) to cash. The other thing it led to was the rise of international ad awards. You see, the sneaky thing about the Gunn Report is that Donald Gunn never explained which awards counted to the final total or what each award was worth. This meant that agencies started entering their ads in somewhat questionable schemes all over the world. But how do you please international jurors? You create ads with as few words as possible, with a conceit that would play as well in Botswana as it would in Basingstoke. So a certain kind of ad began to take precedence: the fewer elements, the better.

That doesn’t mean that such reductive ads were always scam – far from it. An ad with few elements is often a much better ad anyway, due to its greater simplicity. But clients don’t always want ads without their logo or website, so agencies started to create ads whose only purpose was to win awards. I guess that initially it appeared as a kind of laudable proactivity that showed an agency doing extra-curricular work on behalf of its clients. But give human beings an inch and they will always take a mile: huge agencies started devoting entire floors of their buildings, months of the year and the best teams in the department to nothing but the winning of awards. Proactivity became a very deliberate drive towards the collection of Cannes Lions and D&AD Pencils, and the race to the podium inevitably led some to run before they could walk. Some efforts, such as the WWF 9/11 ad and the JC Penney teen-fumbling Speed Dressing spot, crossed far enough over the boundaries of good taste that the clients feigned ignorance of their existence and the agencies involved received global opprobrium.

Soon after came the explosion of media, creating many new categories that awarded ads unlikely to have been seen by anyone in real life: banner ads, pre-roll, experiential, one-off OOH, mobile, social media etc. As nobody saw them, and they took a bit of explaining, they were accompanied by an explanatory entry film, which gave a huge amount of scope for exaggeration (eight people visited the site instead of two? That’s a 300 per cent rise in web traffic!) and, some might say, bullshit. Of course some of these films are genuine, but they come from ad agencies – who can blame them for presenting the best side of something when that’s essentially what they do all day?

If an ad runs and no one sees it…

So now anything can be an ad, and you barely need any proof that it really happened, let alone had any significant impact in the world. Add to that the fact that award schemes have neither the time nor incentive to check the veracity of entries (I believe a client sign-off is enough these days), and you have a vicious cycle of complicitous rule bending, commonly known as ‘scam’.

Is that a problem? Well, it undermines the credibility of what we do. It makes agencies look craven and, I would argue, pathetic. It’s the creation of work whose intended audience is an award jury, not the general public. Is that why we got into this industry? Probably not. Is it why we no longer attract the most creative people? Maybe. Is it why our salaries are shrinking in relative terms? I think so. But while we continue to reward the bullshit, the bullshit will continue to flow.

Follow Ben’s blog here.