Ad Insider - July 08

It is, in psychology, considered a clear sign of insecurity to need constant affirmation of your status. By that definition the advertising profession would qualify for a diagnosis of deep-seated neurosis and be seen in need of urgent treatment.

Almost every profession makes a practise of honouring its outstanding practitioners and practises through some form of awards. But there is certainly no other profession that does it with the scale, scope and regularity of the advertising profession. Lacking the respect of the general public, their clients as well as (crucially) themselves, advertising appears to make a virtue of covering itself with glory repeatedly and at the most flimsy of excuses.

It is another sign perhaps of the extent of the self delusion that our profession has immersed itself in, that we do not even see the absurdity of the situation. Agencies spend enormous time and effort generating brilliant ideas for non-existent clients, or getting regular clients to sign off on "initiative" work, spend even greater effort and time and goodwill in executing those pieces of what is essentially self-gratification, onanism if you will and then large sums of money in submitting the lovingly crafted pieces of nothing for advertising awards.

Advertising awards are often hugely profitable enterprises, many of them corporatized entities with a complex web of relationships. There is something for everyone here. The awards make money for the organisers, the winning of awards make money for those creatives who play the game successfully, giving them mobility and rich rewards. They raise the profile of the agencies who win, and most agencies win somewhere, sometime. They make clients happy -- and clients are increasingly being drawn into the appreciation of these displays of creative flair, indeed demanding it from their agencies.

But there is truly something other-worldly in the experience of standing before the hundreds of entries, ironically dubbed the "shortlist", seeing the work of what are undoubtedly brilliant minds from every corner of the world, easily three quarters of which are outright scam. You cannot help but admire the huge amount of craft, the humour, the insights and the detail that goes into each of these ads. But it is the huge amount of waste that this represents -- waste of talent, waste of effort, waste of money and waste of integrity that remains with you.

I cannot help wondering if all the exertion and the expense that agencies spend on the awards game, for at the end, it is little more than that, were applied to solving genuine communications problems -- of which there are no shortage in the world. What if agencies devoted the same energy they devote to the SPCA of Cambodia and the Yellow Pages of Bratislava to getting Sub-Saharan Africa to using condoms or promoting a better understanding of Islam in Western Europe or reconciling Shia's and Sunni's in Iraq or keeping kids in school in inner-city Detroit or better sanitary habits in rural India or....

Recognition of exceptional achievement, taking the profession forward, rewarding breakthroughs are a legitimate part of any profession and so they should be. But if there is not a process applied (and urgently so) that audits the awards, that weeds out work that is blatant self-promotion and downright illegitimate our entire profession will suffer the results. Let's face it, we are not the most respectable profession to begin with -- it is therefore even more important that we act to enhance what credibility remains.

K T Sandip

Executive Creative Director

Publicis Singapore