Sapient Nitro’s Andy Greenaway says awards ‘monster needs to be fed’
Mumbrella held a video hangout to debate the issues around scam – the practice of ad agencies creating work purely to win awards.
On the show was Andy Greenaway, the Asia Pacific ECD of Sapient Nitro, and Damian Pincus, the creative partner of independent Australian agency The Works.
The debate covered why scam is so prevalent in this region, what’s in it for agencies and clients, the damage it is doing to the industry, and ideas to move the industry forward without it.
“We’ve created a monster and that monster needs to be fed” said Greenaway during the hangout.
Greenaway joined Sapient Nitro in February 2013 after four years at Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was regional creative director. He won many awards during his time with the agency, and also before that at Ogilvy & Mather in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Pincus co-founded independent Australian agency The Works almost 12 years ago. Before that, he worked at TBWA and JWT, where he was creative group head at both agencies.
Damian Pincus
Andy Greenaway
The hangout ran across both of Mumbrella’s Australian and Asia sites, and featured questions from Mumbrella Asia editor Robin Hicks and Mumbrella editor Alex Hayes.
Viewers asked the panel questions by posting in the comment thread of this story or using the hashtag #scamdebate.
I think we should view scam work in a similar way to concept cars in the automotive industry. Despite not always being commercially viable they still help push the industry forward and might inspire other ideas down the track.
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It’s not rocket science.
Many people’s careers and salaries are directly linked to awards won.
Change that, and surely the gold won’t seem quite so shiny.
We really do need to address the issue. We all know the scam work (and the agencies who seem to lean towards it), yet many people just pretend to look the other way.
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@ac
That’s fine, but let’s not have it compete against real work then.
You don’t see concept cars in races or on the road do you?
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@AK you’re right you don’t.
To stick with the car analogy – they don’t compete because concept cars are ideas that are untested and unable to deliver results right away.
Real work should only then be judged on effectiveness- the results it delivered. If a scam is truly a scam then proof of effectiveness will be minimal. If real work has been unable to deliver results then should it actually be awarded?
This is a simple way to pull the 2 apart but requires judges to be stricter on what determines effective work. Scam work can then be judged against blue sky, creative thinking.
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Is there a hint of jealousy amongst the big guys? Who can say that an award wining idea is not a profitable idea for the client? Good ideas get shared. Look at Van Damme doing the splits for Volvo with over 78 million views in 6 months on YouTube alone. Shared content does resonate a lot further than your 15 second TV spot that no one actually watched. Yes, more merit should be placed on the results, but it’s not that easy, because not many clients would want to give away their results.
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I’m not sure concepts cars is the best analogy. I think this is a distortion of the original intent just as much as flashtrading is.
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Awards are out of control. They used to play a minor role in an agency’s life – now, for too many agencies, they are the agency’s life. Awards prey on creative’s insecurities and desperate need to be validated – no matter that the proliferation of awards has meant the validation they provide all but meaningless. So ‘needy’ have we become for our 15 ‘seconds’ of fame we’ve become the helpless prey of the biggest scam artists of them all – the people who own and run awards. Honestly, just how many award shows and does advertising need? We’ve got to get back to the business of advertising if we’re to stop the rot that’s fast killing our industry. Until then, appealing to a creative person’s vanity must surely be the easiest way to part a fool from their money.
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Agency awards have an interesting journey. Celebrated on a night of excess and rinsed off to be displayed proudly in an agency’s reception area. As new ones are won, they are bumped off to reside on a creative persons desk and soon appear to be a dated badge of honour. They find them hard to part with and take it home only to have their partner protest that they don’t really want a display of their work trophies sitting in the living room. They end up in a cardboard box in the bottom of a wardrobe until they end up on the front nature strip then shattered as they are crushed in back of a council dump truck during a quarterly council clean-up. The client in the meantime has long moved on as the agency winning the award did stuff all for their bottom line.
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Currently you have to enter into an award to be recognised. A bit like the BRW best place to work fodder. My office kicks ar3e, has great benefits and might well get into the top 10 (I think it would) – we are not going to enter into an award (probably have to pay to enter too) so that we attract a million more resume’s that we have to churn through / receive loads of calls from job seekers – we get enough already.
Oooh? Could awards be a way for agencies to attract new business and brand to clients? I certainly think so and it can be well worth the investment and it is usually a good p1ss up for the team to boot!
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Dear Mr.Clarity,
Maybe the lure of winning awards is also a way to pay creatives less? Cheaper to let creatives spend $10K each on entries than pay them $30K+ more in salary they probably deserve. Hence the saying “Pay to work there!” It’s why everyone eventually left the Palace – they got sick of the awards – they wanted the money!
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@Mark – Code Digital
“Shared content does resonate a lot further than your 15 second TV spot that no one actually watched”.
This is unsubstantiated rubbish.
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CEOs and CFOs sign off on awards because it serves their purpose perfectly.
It keeps their creative payroll low because senior and expensive non performers can be quickly and quietly cut when they don’t win awards without having to ‘show cause’.
This keeps their creative payroll low by constantly replacing them with cheaper and hungrier ones.
In fact, the targeted non performers are so brow beaten by not winning they rather resign than be terminated, thereby obliging them to conform to their non-compete and no-poaching clauses.
To keep their gig or to break into the six figure bracket, it’s no wonder why everybody scams.
And also why those who sign the award cheques agree to it.
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Comment 1 and 3 nail it.
Scam is scam. We all know what it is.
But don’t race it against real work.
Done. Sealed.
But we need to rename Cannes to “Scannes”.
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Agree with Tom..
It’s prevalent and sometimes we enjoy doing the work.
Work that works really f’in hard is what we need to concentrate on.
Move along, nothing to see here.
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Concept cars … doubt they have ever entered or won a car award.
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