The Hindu Business Line : A scam a day will keep clients away

Advertising is the business of producing great ads. The definition, though not original, encompasses two aspects of the advertising business. The first is, of course, the business aspect of advertising which is built around clients, their brands andtheir businesses. The second part of the definition addresses the core competency of the advertising agency – creativity. Clients want their agencies to be creative as they want solutions to their marketing problems, solutions to help them further their business. The client who is the source of all business to the agency believes that the creative agency is that which solves its marketing problems using its “out-of-the-box” thinking to great effect.

The agency, for its part, seems to think that its creativity is best measured by the number of awards that it wins at the awards nights of various advertising clubs, but the piece de resistance, of course, would be winning at Cannes. This seems to please the creative types in the agency business more than those campaigns that make the cash register ring. The fact that quite a few advertising agencies have creative people at their helm, might, in my opinion, be furthering the clouding and uncertainty in thinking in some advertising agencies at least. To my mind, awards are what the creative mind lives and dies for and I can understand and appreciate that. Because the little piece of silver gets recognition, raises at review time and maybe even brings job offers.

But I do have a problem when the same awards are given amidst huge fanfare for work that is “scam”. For the benefit of those who do not understand this “concept” let me quickly clarify: These are “one-off” pieces of communication that are released in inexpensive media and are often paid for by the agency. This piece of work, where, without the client’s intervention, the agency can push the creative envelope to the maximum, is often entered at various awards events and usually wins, competing as it does with other work which sells its clients’ products and obviously loses out on flair. The former wins awards and acclaim while the latter builds brands and buys market share.

Scams in the limelight

Scams are not a recent phenomenon. They have been around for some time and allowed because lots of people were doing it. It was within the rules! In a sense it is like bowling underarm which was within the purview of the rules. But the sordid nature of that action and how much below the belt it was perhaps was realised by the cricketing world only when Greg Chappell, the then captain of Australia, instructed his brother Trevor Chappell to bowl the ball underarm in a one-day international cricket match lest the New Zealand batsman hit the last ball of the match for six! Then the world sat up and took notice and the furore it created drew attention to the need of the authorities to do something about the anomaly.

Similarly, something has happened in the advertising world in India that has drawn sharp attention to the existing practice of scam ads. McCann, a global agency of repute which handles the Hanes underwear account, released a series of ads in India in The Free Press Journal (a Mumbai newspaper) about gays and lesbians that were bizarre, in my opinion, at least.

Of course, there is a small difference today. Thanks to the World Wide Web everything that one communicates even in one’s neighbourhood is now known to the whole world. As a consequence, there were protests in the US.

The client in the US was annoyed, to put it mildly, and went on record to say that the agency had released the campaign without the client’s specific approval for its own benefit and now the very relationship of client and agency seems to be in a state of jeopardy. The agency on its part said that some junior creative people in their enthusiasm and anxiety to win awards had released these ads on their own, which seems a bit far fetched. But instead of getting into the specifics of what one particular agency has done, let’s try to stay with the problem and try to address it.

Back to the basics

Why do clients need agencies? Clients are good at making products. Their expertise is in manufacturing products, pricing them and distributing them for profit. They need agencies because agencies are good at solving communication problems and can make their products stand out from the competition through smart positioning and snazzy execution. Mind you, this is not easy. Campaigns usually get through after enormous discussion, research, fine-tuning and the final creative product may end up being slightly different from the original layout. But there is no walking away from the fact that the client is required not only to pay the bills but also to ensure that the ad is right on strategy.

It is equally likely that some clients can actually ensure through their intervention that the final ad is much worse than the initial layout that was presented. But a poor client does not justify bypassing her entirely and merely producing ads for awards, which have no relation to the market place and its needs.

Agencies need to remind themselves and keep reminding themselves of their very reason for being - to solve problems, sell products, build brands, and if they win awards while doing this, it is a bonus. Let me digress to the subject of cricket where teams and nations compete to win. They can do so either by boring spectators to death even as they win, or entertain even as they win. This is why people like Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Adam Gilchrist and their likes, shine. They are competing with the toughest teams and winning without boring us to death.

The same principle can and must apply to advertising. The first basic requirement has to be that the campaign has to work at the marketplace and the next bonus is when the brand’s advertising entertains and wins awards.

Why are agencies doing this?

Clearly the process of designing scam ads and winning awards seems reprehensible. But this is not an isolated phenomenon or an exception that we are talking about. More and more agencies seem to be jumping on to the band wagon. Winning awards can be and often is one of the key objectives that agencies set for themselves. It is not unheard of for agencies to meet in exotic places to determine their strategy for winning awards. But it cannot be a strategy for designing and winning scam awards!

Are agency heads resorting to this as they are unable to provide a challenging work ethic or the money that young creative minds deserve? Are they buying peace by rewarding those creative minds that do outstanding scam awards? And what about those creative minds that struggle with client’s problems and offer solutions? Who will take care of them?

Are we maligning clients?

Client-bashing is an agency pastime that is as old as the hills. But there have been outstanding clients in the past and there will be outstanding clients in the future too. Clients who respect the agency and its contribution to their business. Clients who respect the value of the creative and who respect the agency and its point of view as well. Many of these clients have watched happily when their agencies have won awards for their brands. Work produced for brands such as Fevicol, Asian Paints, Bajaj, Surf Excel and Happy Dent, to name just a few, have won awards and consistently so.

The great thing about these is that these campaigns have all had visible exposure in major media (not just one-off ads in some marginal media) all paid for by the client, and the campaigns have worked at the market place. It is not easy, but it can be done. But it can be done only by working closely with clients, not by upsetting and bypassing them.

It is the ethics, silly!

It seems ludicrous even to speak of ethics and advertising in the same breath, but any business must be built on the cornerstone of ethics - even advertising. I am not taking the moral high ground or being judgmental here, but I do believe that if agencies were to step back and think for just a moment, then they would not share the same enthusiasm for scam ads.

The advertising industry collectively and individually has been responsible for building the brand image and salience of its clients. It is, perhaps, worthwhile for the agency to think about its own image. This latest controversy has perhaps been the last thing it needs, even as agencies struggle to attract and retain talent. More critically, it is a loss of face with clients that could hurt the agency business more.

This is one more reminder that the agency business suffers from an acute lack of leadership. The real leaders such as Subhash Ghoshal, R. K. Swamy and S. R. Ayer are not running the industry today. I always wonder whether any true leader would have allowed this to happen. The answer is a resounding “No”.

And herein lies the way forward. The easy way may not be the best way. But it needs courage to buck the sad trend. Are we equal to it? I certainly hope so.

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm and the author of One Land, One Billion Minds.)

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