I Sea: Maybe a good deed should be its own reward
Grey Singapore's mud-slinging statement on handing back the Cannes Lion it won for the I Sea app shows the global creative network really doesn't understand how bad the issue was, argues Mumbrella editor Alex Hayes.
As apologies go, Grey Singapore’s overnight effort upon handing back its Cannes Lion it won undeservingly for an app which preyed on emotion around migrant deaths and ultimately was found not to work, was one of the worst I’ve ever seen.
The petulant attitude from the network shines through in the statement put out in the name of Grey’s global head of comms Owen Dougherty.
The last line sums it up perfectly:
The saying no good deed goes unpunished is apt in this case.
Well, Owen, there’s another saying your mum might have taught you:
A good deed is its own reward.
What’s really disappointing with this is the fact that Grey has singularly failed to recognise why this piece of non work is quite so inflammatory for the rest of the creative world, which is normally so quick to turn a blind eye to ‘concept’ work.
If you’re still struggling, Owen, I’ll break it down for you. Grey won an award for a product which fundamentally didn’t work, and according to people much more technically proficient than me, would be very tough to make work, and actually not help the situation much anyway.
Like all good case study videos, Grey’s tugged on the heart strings. Sickeningly on this occasion it used the deaths of more than 5,000 people seeking a better life to make that emotional point. And ultimately, all to win awards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFeHQ2YQTqY
In your statement Owen you use the weasel-worded defence that has become a refrain for those caught out in the industry, pointing the finger at unnamed bloggers for sullying your noble deeds.
Owen, mate, you’ve been called out by half of the world’s press, in bylined article after bylined article. Mashable, The Daily Telegraph in the UK, The Guardian, The Verge, Buzzfeed, The Daily Mail, Gawker and Popular Science are a handful of the titles globally which have covered this farrago.
Yes, it was originally exposed by a tech blogger who writes as SwiftOnSecurity but plenty of people have put their full names to their disgust in the days since. Including a senior marketer on LinkedIn, where there’s absolutely no hiding your identity.
Even your supposed client called bullshit on the idea telling British IT title The Register:
“The Migrant Offshore Aid Network did not develop the app with Grey for Good nor do we feel that there [are] any advantages to having the public scan old sat images for potential disasters that in reality unfold in seconds.”
So even the people you’re supposed to be helping say it wouldn’t actually help. That’s not a great look.
And then to compound it all you come out with this half-arsed and petulant statement pointing the finger of blame at everyone but the people it should be levelled at. It’s another example of a global network showing it is completely unable to manage its own reputation.
BBDO’s global creative chief Dave Lubars gave a good lesson in how to do it when he called out one of his own agencies from the stage at Cannes this year: “I learned last night that one of our very own agencies had a pretty scammy ad in the festival, and it won a Lion.
“I told them to return it. Because I don’t want that kind of Lion. BBDO doesn’t want that kind of Lion.”
AlmapBBDO did return it, and were allowed to win Agency of the Year still. But that’s another story.
Almap’s ‘Scammy’ ad for Bayer
Swift action and an acknowledgement of the problem makes BBDO look a hell of a lot more credible than the Grey network right now, especially after this statement.
While we’re here Owen perhaps you want to answer a few other questions like: Why was an app that is still in testing phase put onto the App Store?; why was a non-completed concept entered into Cannes?; why has it taken three weeks for this mealy mouthed statement non-apology to be forthcoming?; and why won’t anyone from Grey engage openly and honestly on this topic?
There’s still questions for Cannes on this one, including whether the perpetrators will be banned from entering for a period of time? It will be interesting if the organisers of the Cannes Lions use the return of the award as an excuse to sweep the whole affair under the carpet. After all, it would be a bad moment to annoy Grey’s parent company WPP just as boss Sir Martin Sorrell is questioning the value of his multimillion dollar investment in the event.
Owen, Grey has been caught with its hand firmly in the cookie jar on this one. Just replace a hunger for cookies with a craving for awards.
It’s probably a little late now to salvage the reputation of the Grey for Good unit, inside the industry at least.
The best thing they could do is get their heads down now and concentrate on solutions for some of the world’s big issues that actually work. Not in concept, not in a testing mode, and not playing on the emotion surrounding one of the biggest humanitarian crises the world has faced since World War 2.
If I were them I wouldn’t be entering any award shows for the foreseeable future, because any juror worth their salt will be picking over every element of their entry like advertising’s version of CSI.
But awards aren’t the be all and end all, right?
After all, a good deed is its own reward.
It’s extremely frustrating that there has been no apology or recognition that what they did was fundamentally wrong. It wasn’t just another Maccas press ad that appeared once in a local newspaper to win at Cannes, they were using a horrible situation to benefit from winning an award. I’m a marketer, and I definitely will not forget this smug attitude and response from the big dogs at Grey when it comes to any future agency pitches.
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There seems to be a bit of herd mentality in the way this has been reacted to. Unfortunately Grey group has tripped in its response.
You are right in asking Grey to be greycious
in this herd mentality where everyone has gleefully attacked the agency (and little of Cannes) – I’d have expected a senior journalist to at least offer them the benefit of doubt.
The app didn’t work, and perhaps Cannes should have been smart enough.
Clearly things are broken, but going only after the agency that gave an idea (and took an unpopular stance for immigration) is in my opinion not fair.
I found this entire episode where the piranhas attacked an agency so savagely for a lapse rather disappointing. Grey too on its behalf could have handled this better.
But this does not take away from Grey’s other achievements, which Is why I’d rather give them the benefit of doubt.
And Cannes on the other hand…
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Hi Peter,
Thanks for reading.
Can I clarify what you’re asking for Grey to have the benefit of the doubt over? The fact they entered something that doesn’t work and probably never will into an awards show, or the fact they’ve used a humanitarian disaster as the backbone for a short term gain? If the app wasn’t ready why enter it so early? And if it was intended to work why not actually work closely with the supposed client to make sure it would be useful?
We’ve raised our questions and outlined the issues we have with Cannes time and again. Ultimately though they don’t make the entries, the agencies do. So should they not ultimately be held to account?
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
Grey SG has been behind a whole raft of scam for the last few years – this was the straw that broke the camels back. They’ve been getting away with it for so long, which perhaps explain the ferociousness of the response to this one (that was finally caught out).
#greyfortheirowngood
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Great piece Alex and well done on the way this being reported. The response from Grey is unacceptable and a mea culpa would have been better. But on the information we’ve been presented, this was a flawed idea on every level and the idea that a Cannes jury awarded it with a prize is equally poor. Is anyone from Cannes speaking publicly about it? How the heck did it win anything?
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Huzzah.
The industry needs to name and shame everyone involved in the scam app, the entry, and the petulant response. These are supposed to be masters of brand image and customer relations, and they are tarnishing an already lacklustre industry and the processes we use to celebrate those who made a genuine difference (both corporate and humanitarian).
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Peter – if you are the caliber of spin doctor one can expect from Grey, its obvious why they failed.
They lied to the group they were “supporting”.
They gathered passport numbers, no mention of what they did with that data.
They lied to the press, public, judging board.
They lied and claimed it was evil bloggers taking them down for trying to do good, demanding people ignore evidence it was all faked.
Tay, @SwiftonSecurity, didn’t even do the most damage in deconstructing it yet she was the poster child for where the hate should go.
It wasn’t hate of immigrants or immigration that lead to this, it was wholesale baldface lying about the app and what it could/would do preying on those who wanted to help while profiting.
One could hazard a guess that the return of the award was saving face before the judges ripped it back from their clawing unworthy hands.
They lied to win a meaningless award, because the industry values awards over actually being good.
What other achievements?
I’d love a list, so that knowledgeable tech people can look at them.
The press ate up this story without question, how many other projects are just scenic paintings hung on a fence hiding a garbage dump?
-TAC
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Peter, I’m the one that did the reverse engineering of the I SEA app that resulted in the proof it was fake and resulted in it getting pulled from the App Store.
I did give Grey the benefit of the doubt when I started. My initial response was actually defend Grey as just having a bad design for their user interface and that was the initial reason I looked into it.
The app was totally incapable of doing anything it claimed. It always retrieved a static image of water from Grey’s servers (which Grey could change server-side during demos to the press and when creating screenshots).
None of the APIs they used (Google Maps and Weather Underground) were even capable of returning data for the Mediterranean Sea. Google has no satellite images of the water (instead it returns a generic blue watermarked tile) and the Weather Underground data was from an often incapacitated weather station in Misurata, Libya.
Even in testing mode, I SEA was incapable of doing anything. It looked like a slapdash UI demo, nothing more.
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“No good deed goes unpunished”.
There was no good deed here. The app doesn’t work, was never going to work, and the client said it was a terrible idea and wouldn’t be part of it.
There is some Kanye level arrogance going on here.
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Grey was one of the world’s most prolific cigarette advertising agencies back in the day… Ironically Owen’s statement actually reminds me of one of those guys from Thank You for Smoking.
Either way, Grey has earned itself a place on the ‘do not approach to pitch’ list for a while. No client wants this shit on their conscience.
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