In April every year, the ad world?s creative stars head for the long languid beaches of Goa. They celebrate the best of creative work in India?s equivalent of the French Riviera, amidst bright twinkling lights, well stocked bars, coloured confetti, and blaring music. This year, one of advertising?s big guns ? ad agency Ogilvy & Mather will not be there at the Abby awards. The agency has said that it will give all local awards a miss, because it has deep seated issues with the judging process. For the record, it did not participate in the 2013 Abby awards as well. The agency will instead cherish its best work, via its internal awards called ?The Envies.? It ended year 2013 on a high note by giving away 35 creative awards in a plush event which saw the cr?me of the Indian ad industry in attendance, along with the legend of the film world Amitabh Bachchan. Google?s Reunion ad won the Grand Prix, which is equivalent to the best of show.
The spotlight is once again on the Creative Abby. The awards show has been riddled with controversies over judging misdemeanors, scam advertising, plagiarised work and leaked results. Over the last few years, many creative agencies have given it a miss citing creative differences, budgetary reasons or lack of cutting edge work. Setting up or promoting an internal awards show, is another route to not participate in the local awards, many fear. An agency chief who?s played a decisive role in the setting up of the Goafest speaks on the condition of anonymity, ?My biggest frustration is the juvenile behaviour of some of the veteran advertising chiefs. They behave like kids in a park. If I don?t win enough awards, I will not participate. That?s been their attitude all along.?
Ogilvy may have just constituted its internal awards, but ad agency Lowe Lintas has had its internal awards called the ?The True Show? for a good many years now. It has also been absent from the Abby. Dentsu India has instituted its ?Award for Creative Excellence? while McCann WorldGroup has named its internal award?McCann International Award?. Rohit Ohri, executive chairman, Dentsu India Group says that awards help in creating internal benchmarks. ?Internal awards are not new to the industry. Nearly every agency has one. But it all depends on how you position the awards. For example Dentsu too has an internal award called Award for Creative Excellence. We shortlist some of the best work for the awards. The creative ads that bag the maximum awards internally are first sent to the local award shows and then to the global awards shows. This is the way many agencies decide on their entries for various awards,? said Ohri.
Prasoon Joshi, executive chairman and chief executive of McCann Worldgroup says that an award is a novel way to encourage the youth to create better work. At the same time, youngsters should not be overly captivated with the idea of winning an award. ?We at McCann have our own awards. However we have chosen not to publicize it, as the awards are more of a motivational tool,? explains Joshi.
The question that begs to be asked is whether more rebel agencies will constitute their own internal awards and will these take precedence over industry awards. M G Parameswaran, executive director and CEO, DraftFCB Ulka and vice-president, Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) says that there is no connection between internal and external awards. The two are mutually exclusive. ?Internal awards are needed because it is important to applaud the work of your staff. Every company, be it Rediffusion -Y&R, Johnson & Johnson, Tata Group amongst others, has their own internal awards. External awards, be it local or global awards are needed to provide a bigger stage. Both can co-exist,? said Parameswaran.
The politics of awards
Each year, there is a new controversy that gets the agencies in a huddle. Last year, ad agency Leo Burnett was asked to withdraw two radio spots for Tata Salt Lite, after they were suspected to be ?proactive? work from the agency. The Goafest 2013 also first withdrew the metals won by BBDO Proximity for work on DHL, after alleged plagiarism. DDB Mudra?s work for Electrolux also came under scrutiny. Later, the super jury, part of the Awards Governing Council (AGC) reinstated those metals, stating that any speculation on the authenticity of the ads, post awards ceremony will not be entertained.
Ogilvy?s decision to give the Abby a miss has created a myriad of reactions. Some are secretly glad because the competition is far lesser. Ogilvy was seen as hogging the lion?s share of the spotlight. Others feel that Ogilvy not participating has stolen the thunder of the Abby awards. What?s the competition worth if a die-hard competitor prefers to sit the fence? ?An awards show without Ogilvy, is not worth it. It?s like the time when India won a Gold Medal in Hockey in 1980 at the Olympics. Most countries had boycotted the event at the time, and Indians did not get any joy whatsoever from that win.? said Naresh Gupta, managing partner and chief strategy officer, ad agency Bang in the Middle.
Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and national creative director Ogilvy & Mather India and South Asia said that the most important thing for any award is to preserve its respect through its jury. ?Any award show is as good as its jury. The jury has to comprise people who are respected in the industry. In order to be popular amongst people, an awards committee invites anyone to be a part of the jury. A democratic approach is followed today when it comes to selecting the jury for the award. The result is that there is no great pride attached to wining an Abby. So when an award is no longer respected there is no reason for people to participate in it,? said Pandey. He believes that the Envies had a far more selective jury. There weren?t 100 plus jury members.
Interpublic agency Lowe Lintas was one of the first ones to introduce its own internal awards in 2003. Last year, it it celebrated ’10 years of not giving a damn about awards? by honouring the agencies? own best work through the decade. In 2011, another Interpublic ad agency McCann did not participate in the Abby. ?Our story is more than 10 years old. We feel that that there is no credibility in the judging process and so we do not support the local awards. Evaluating Indian creative work based on international standards is not the correct way of judging work. International norms cannot be applied to local awards. Local awards should be judged as per the effectiveness of the campaign in the local markets. We feel that new set of norms must be created to judge local awards,? says Aamer Jaleel, national creative director, Lowe Lintas.
Hall of shame
India has been gaining international notoriety for producing scam ads, giving stiff competition to other scam centres such as Brazil. Scam ads are those ads that don?t amount to genuine creative work, and have been created just for the purpose of winning awards. Many times, such ads do not come with the seal of approval from the advertiser. Last year, there was a storm over the Ford Figo leaked adverts that displayed brutality and bondage, featuring caricatures of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian amongst others. Ad agency JWT India which produced the ads went into damage control and fired senior executives who were part of these the ads. Its parent company WPP had to come out with an apology, as did the Ford Motor Company. Worse still, Ford said that it had no knowledge of these ads and had not given consent to them. Soon after, Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and chairman of Creativeland Asia quit the festival in totality ? from judging to the agency?s representation at the festival. ?Scam ads have destroyed the domestic awards. Agencies shout against each other but when the din dies down, they are the first to encourage scam ads.
Our scam ads have also gone international. Even The Guardian did a story on India?s scam shame? said Meenakshi Madhvani, managing partner, Spatial Access Solutions.
Madhvani believes that agency heads are to blame for this sorry state of affairs. ?Let each agency head be held accountable for shame ads and let their pictures hang in the ‘Hall of Shame?,? she says, adding that it is the only way this insidious practice will die out. As long as the agency chiefs have scapegoats to bank on, they will turn an indulgent eye on scam ads. ?In fact, legitimise scam advertising by having scam awards where the agency presents ideas that have not seen the light of day and have not been approved by clients. Let it be the advertising for the creative people and not for the brands,? she adds.
Parameswaran says that in 2014, the Goafest committee will surely bring about a change as far the issue of scam ads is concerned. He says that in the last five years, a good many ads across platforms in India and globally, have been created with the intention of winning awards. Even at the Cannes Lions, work has been created purely with the intention of winning an award. Television is the only exception as the nature of the medium does not allow for such work. In many cases, clients (advertisers) have been known to give their tactic approval to such work, as they want their brands to win awards. ?Clients are lackadaisical as long as their brands win awards. To address the issue of scam ads, from this year onwards, no single entry will accepted at the Goafest without the client’s brief and approval,? he adds.
Ditching local for global
Advertisers believe that there was a time when winning an Abby added to the prestige of an agency. What’s more, it even helped in winning a new business or, for that matter, retaining one. Local awards today have been reduced to decorative items occupying shelf space in offices/agencies. The prestige factor no longer holds. Pravin Kulkarni, general manager (marketing), Parle Products says that while awards may bring great joy to the creative community ? for a brand, what really matters is whether a campaign has fulfilled its objective in the market place or not. Santosh Desai, managing director and chief executive, Futurebrands goes on to say that for some reason the industry has chosen to believe in?awards and use them as an internal yardstick to measure the impact of their work, which is not accepted by the external world. In the world outside, what really matters is how the campaign performed in terms of sales and market share. But Ohri of Dentsu feels that awards are relevant. ?Awards help in keeping businesses, if not winning one,? he says, ?Clients (advertisers) never directly tell an agency that they want to win an award, but they always desire for one,? added Ohri.
Local awards play a role in uniting the ad industry. It brings peers together. It allows one to compete at a national level and adds real worth to the metal. ?Local awards have a role to play in making creative people feel good about their work. When your work is compared on a national scale, you realise where you stand. You also have local awards in Chennai and Bangalore which enables one to gauge the level of work in the respective states,? added Parameswaran of DraftFCB Ulka.
Indian agencies are besotted with international ad awards such as Cannes Lions and D&AD. Networks are willing to let go of local awards and put in greater money towards entries in global awards. ?International awards matter. They carry greater prestige and add more to the agency?s reputation,? remarks Gupta of Bang in the Middle. For Joshi, if one is talking about an international award like Cannes then it is definitely worth attending. He says that international ad awards add to the professional?s life, and are also necessary for the industry?s future. ?Also, given the fact, that we now live in a global world and are much more connected, global awards have more relevance compared to local awards,? said Joshi.
By not entering local awards, creative agencies are able to save a lot money and this in turn helps them enter more categories in international awards. Harish Bijoor, chief executive at Harish Bijoor Consults says, ?This is a reason for agencies giving a cold shoulder to local awards. By not attending a local award, it helps in saving travel time ? as there is no requirement to send a big team to attend a local awards show. Secondly, each creative agency has a budget for awards. Giving a miss to a local award allows creative agencies to enter those many entries in global awards,? Joshi however opines that while budget is an issue, it is not the only reason why at times creative agencies decide to opt out of a local award. Sometimes an agency decides to stay away from a local award because it may not have any work worth showcasing. Even in the years when McCann did not participate, it still sent token entries as a gesture of respect for Abby and the creative fraternity, he maintained. It is certainly not equivalent to boycotting the awards.
Joshi added that when it comes to participating in international awards, one is much more selective. ?There are times when it becomes very difficult to make the international jury understand your work and the kind of impact it has had in the market. A lot more work is entered in local awards as the jury will be able to understand the creative work in reference to the cultural context. Also, there are many international awards that we do not participate in, but it doesn’t imply that we are boycotting those awards,? said Joshi.
But the limited availability of funds also has a counter effect and gets many agencies cling on to local awards. ?An agency has about 700-800 people and majority of them are in the age bracket of 30-35 years. The agency cannot send everyone to Cannes (France) or London to attend D&AD, therefore local awards are the platform to send these youngsters,? explains Ohri.
Web of issues
Pandey of Ogilvy asserts that so far there have been many claims on making the awards foolproof, but on ground, the situation remains much the same. ?The issues need to be handled at the grass root level. The desperation to win an award is leading to a flouting of all norms. What happens is that while people claim to work within a set of boundaries, they still break the rules and the system is not able to control the situation. I have been trying for many years to change things, but not much has happened. So we now have Envies to reward our people’s work,? adds Pandey. Joshi believes that the real issue is that the ad industry expects too much from the awards. ?We should understand that awards are meant to sharpen our craft and skills and should be taken in the right spirit. This is not an industry, say like the sports industry, where awards are a matter of life and death,? he added.
Ad agency Lowe has been out of the race for about a decade now, but hopes that in the future, it could be a part of the Abby. No promises just yet though. The agency is happily sitting it out. Jaleel hopes that with more agencies creating their internal awards, a new dawn will break for the industry awards Abby. New standards of creativity will emerge, and a whole new set of norms will take precedence. Meanwhile, the Abby remains controversy?s favourite child. In its 20-year trajectory, it has witnessed many creative agencies throw in the towel, only to return to it later. ?Brand Abby is a 20-year-old property while the Ad Club is a 40-year-old entity. Both have been in existence for more than a decade and they are strong brands. We should not forget that every brand, new or old, goes through ups and downs. Like any other storm, this too shall pass,? said, Parameswaran.
