The Mumbrella confessional: What it’s like to work at a scam agency
In the first of an occasional series, an anonymous creative tells Mumbrella’s Robin Hicks what it’s like working within an agency dedicated to using scam to win awards. This article appeared originally on Mumbrella Asia.
I worked for this agency as a creative. I quit for a job at another agency when the churn and burn culture and the preoccupation with awards became too much. But I still have friends who work there.
Every agency network does scam in Singapore, more or less. But I can safely say that this was the most extreme environment I’ve ever worked in.
Whenever awards seasons kicks in, the whole place goes crazy. The pressure is on all the creatives to deliver award-winning ideas from the local CEO, the regional CEO and the creative director, with the global creative director breathing down his neck.
There are roundtable sessions held on a Monday morning, first thing at 9am, when the creatives teams share their ideas. The brief is to spot a social problem somewhere in the world, and come up with a brilliant way to solve it. The creative director picks the ideas he likes the most; the ones with the most award-winning potential.
We usually only had the weekend to work on these ideas, so many of them were half-baked and not properly thought through. Some were just plain weird.
I had a problem with an idea that would supposedly be a health benefit to women in a particular part of the world. What if we got it wrong? It could be dangerous, I suggested. I was ignored. This idea has gone on to win a number of awards.
And that’s the goal – awards. Despite what the agency might say about wanting to do good, its ambitions are purely about winning metal, and therefore winning new business and revenue on the back of it all.
Another idea I had a problem with was an app supposedly designed to help people with a particular disability. It simply didn’t work. But that was beside the point. It would win at Cannes.
This agency is not an app-developing agency. Apps are just not part of the agency’s skill set. But the company releases this stuff as ‘testers’ dressed up as workable solutions that will change the world.
And when it emerges that these life-saving apps don’t actually work, suddenly the people at the top vanish – and the juniors are thrown under the bus.
That’s the culture of the place.
The people in charge, who in my view have no business being in the creative industry, ensure that they’re protected and can carry on regardless of any scrutiny the agency falls under.
A big issue is that the creative department is seriously under-staffed. We’d work all week – a typical day is 9:00am to 9:00pm – mostly on real clients. But during awards seasons, we’d work from 9:00am to 2:00am (sometimes pulling all-nighters to meet awards deadlines) on scam that would eat into time on paying clients whose work would suffer as a consequence.
The agency lost a large chunk of one of its largest accounts because the work had deteriorated while we were working on scam.
For the scam work itself, the agency would bring in unpaid interns to do the grunt work, under the guise that they were being taught the trade. They’d get overloaded with projects, would have no idea what they were for, and get no credit for their contribution.
They would put the deck and case study videos together, sourcing all the footage from Vimeo and YouTube. They would find the footage, cut it, and write script for the video. I did a few of these myself.
Did I have a choice? Yes. Creatives do have a choice whether or not to do scam. But ultimately, if you’re not winning awards you will be let go. You will be under the microscope and not in a good way. So effectively it’s a must.
And a lot of people can’t really go anywhere – the job is all they have. And if they question the system, as I did on a number of occasions, they will come under scrutiny.
I thought if I stayed there any longer I’d either burn out or get into serious trouble, because of the sort of scam work the agency was producing.
I’m at another agency now. Do they do scam? Yes, they do. The difference is that they do not cross the line of pretending to help people, which is the worst sort of lie an agency can tell.
- Have you got a confession? We’ll protect your anonymity – email alex@mumbrella.com.au
topics
scam advertising
Great article, thank you to the author who wrote it and Mumbrella for posting it. This is another voice adding to what some of us already feel or know – that scam is not just the work of some small outpost agency running rogue. It’s endemic, in some countries more than others, and it’s as much the fault of the Regional and Worldwide Chief Creative Officers who oversee the agencies as it is for the people who work for it – if not more so. They have the power, not the lowly underpaid and overworked Art Directors and Copywriters. If we want to see a stand against scam it needs to come from the top.
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Advertisers telling lies? Never.
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An all too familiar scenario. Perhaps agencies should try to develop an idea to rid the industry of this endemic disease, make an app for it, do the Cannes video, and enter that in the award shows! After all, it has become a social problem for the young creatives especially with the mindless hours of torture spent on these scams.(and also the agency’s real clients who get second rate work because the creative teams are totally knackered mentally from the long hours spent knocking this stuff out, instead of putting in the time on the real work to make it better).
What’s actually quite sad about all this is that young people coming into the advertising industry are drilled to think this is normal, and what we actually do for a living. The game is no longer about awarding creativity, which is what it used to be about. D&AD is for me the only award worth winning as it has a history of scrutinising the scamming and reading the very best real work.
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I’d like to know if the writer of this article, was able to command more money from the agency job he/she went to, once they had the Cannes Scam award under their belt, from the first agency they’ve outed.
Because, that’s the real issue I fear….
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Your story is one of many. Allow me to brag and boast about my awards. As a creative I’ve been working at various agencies throughout the Asia Pacific region for more than a decade and won a total of 22 awards so far at international, regional and local award shows.
Of those awards, including Cannes, 15 are total scam (shoved down clients’ throats by b*llsh*tting them into signing off on it, with fake media reports, the works), 5 are sort of scam (no client brief, no client budget, but at least one media placement as “proof”), and only 2 are actual awards that came with a real brief, real budget, real strategy, real media, but merely Bronze at local award shows.
Each of those agencies lost clients due to the agency’s award fever and never got any new business based on the “merit” of any of those awards.
Clients simply don’t care. (“An advertising award show in Pattaya, Thailand? Pattaya? That’s like having the Oscars in a brothel.” as one of my clients replied many years ago)
What I would like to add to this story is the unfairness in salaries of award winning creatives, or scam creatives. Many, if not most, scam creatives can’t handle a proper brief. They are seen as the rockstars, the cowboys, or even the pirates of the industry. Big egos that live for the award shows with salaries that don’t match their abilities. Throw a brief at them for a weekly supermarket ad and they become unbearably obnoxious and irritatingly arrogant. They are “too good” for 90% of the briefs that are thrown into the creative mosh pit. Cherry picking their way through briefing sessions while any potential brief is greeted with a “f**k the brief”.
CEOs and ECDs justify that to the rest of the heavily underpaid and overworked staff as a “necessary evil” to give the agency its well-deserved exposure. And exposure comes at a cost. Yes, losing the trust of your clients.
Feel free to add.
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Good start here. Did the author ever work under [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy]
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Unfortunately it’s a lose-lose situation. As a creative who has worked in many of the big agencies in Sydney over many years. I believe the scam scene, whilst there to prop up the public personas of our bigger ego’d ECD’s also comes from the very top. I remember working in an agency that was about to go under. Clients were unhappy, staff were leaving, the agency was losing money hand over fist. The big guys in the holding company in Europe were screaming to get the agency back on it’s feet, make some money, keep the clients happy so they would stay. When the agency did just this after a year of ridiculously hard work, the big knobs from Europe responded with “But where are the awards?”. You can’t win. The work wasnt bad – but it wasn’t wasn’t designed to win at Cannes either. No matter how hard creatives try, clients don’t seem to want to buy that stuff. If REAL work clients want to pay for, and awards went hand in hand, you wouldn’t have this situation. As a creative you almost have to choose now – am I going to lie, scam and win awards, or am I going to be an actually commercially useful creative.
This year at Cannes, I saw a lot of work awarded that IS actually from a real brief.VW, McDonalds, Harvey Nichols, etc – those clients and creatives should be applauded. Maybe it’s turning around.
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This is so disgusting.
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