2014 Annual: The 10 best quotes of the year
Among the many hundreds of interviews we have conducted, conferences we have attended and stories we have written over the past 12 months, some remarks stand out from the rest. Steve Jones goes in search of the year’s 10 best quotes.
“If you had marketers on boards they could put procurement back in their box which is where procurement really belongs.
“It’s in everyone’s interest to see that happen because procurement will be just part of the process rather than the dominant part of the process which is what we have at the moment.”
“There is no way Ten’s 2015 line-up can be described as ‘frugal’, ‘lean’ and ‘minimalist’.”
“The ferocity of the complaints has been quite upsetting. They are abusive, and the young ladies handling the complaints for me have been offended. That has rocked our socks off. I don’t think people are too sensitive, that’s not for me to judge, but it is incredibly difficult to do anything in society in a public forum that does not get a complaint.
“If everything was taken off air that we got a complaint about then there would be a lot of white noise out there.”
“Most, if not all of you, are factory workers, producing the collateral that goes into the media and marketplace, and then you decry the fact that people want to lower the cost of the factory. They can get someone overseas in the global market to produce what you produce for a tenth of the price.
“So many agencies are purely here to create collateral, create crap, and create more advertising.”
Greenberg
“Sometimes we even view, oddly enough, that while something may not be real, it still may be very innovative and so we sort of give it a break…If it’s really innovative, and it might have a bed of scam connected to it, we sort of let it pass. It’s still showing the way forward.”
R/GA co-founder Bob Greenberg shares his view on scam during a live Mumbrella hangout
“With this current set of issues raised by Mumbrella we have spoken to agencies and marketers and have been satisfied that the intent of the work was legitimate. The world is not black and white and strategies that are adopted to test and break new boundaries should be accepted if all parties concur that they were genuine and legitimate. Super Bowl ads run once.”
“It is not something we would go again because of the negativity. In hindsight, I don’t think it was a bad idea but if we did it again then we would give more thought to the nature of the awards.”
“It will be an inferior local service because of the rights that currently sit with Seven, Nine, Ten, ABC, Foxtel and, you know, they have looked at this market and they’ve seen that.”
“Soon, the genuine work that helped oil the machines of client economies would recede from the stage, the blogs and the annuals. We’d all be winning awards for pet projects. Hobbies. Flights of fancy.
“And everybody could play. Not just people in our profession, but anyone in the world who has an idea. Plumbers, bankers, bus drivers. And yes, even clients. They could show us that they’re as good at making up shit as we are. But that’s fair. It’s an open economy all devised to celebrate creativity, right?
“We’d be artists. Making whatever the fuck we wanted and getting awarded for doing so.
“Sound good? Then fuck off and be an artist.”
“We can’t give up on print. It is a very good business and will be for years to come but the industry hasn’t led in the past. Some of our competitors were talking it down, actively talking it down in their own products, and that’s just crazy.
“That’s a lack of leadership which is frankly irresponsible and it’s got to stop. We have not done a good enough job in recent years of explaining the strength of our business and that’s what we have to do better.”
topics
Bob greenberg
Cannes
Darren Woolley
Daryl Head
Lachlan Murdoch
Mat Baxter
Matt Batten
Monica Rosenfeld
myPlates
Netflix
Presto
procurement
scam
scam ads
Shaun James
Terry Savage
