Shortlisted Cannes Lions ads ran once, in local parenting mag

Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.

Gold diggers

Eastwood will clean out the creative department anyway when he starts as global CCO

Hi Alex, how many times does a print ad need to run for you to not write a story about it?

Over it.

press releases with headlines like ‘JWT Appoints Award Winning xxx’ no longer have any credibility then.

Well this is getting pathetic. Stop trying to undermine every creative who has done well. They said it ran, leave it alone.

Clients are so gutless that
in order not to suicide,
you have to do scam ads.

I’m fucking over it!!!!!!!!!!! it didn’t win a Cannes lion or anything…. I’m over it!!!!

Once the heat is off me I’m all for ICAC following this caper up

I like both the Banlice and the Combantrin ads. Wish the clients did more with them.

JWT has also said an ad for Johnson & Johnson worming brand Combantrin….also ran on Seven in Queensland, “due to high product usage in this area”

So alongside the Big Pineapple, the Big Prawn and the Big Banana can we can look forward to the Big Threadworm being the next big QLD tourist attraction

So topical ads are out too Mumbrella?
One-off pieces of outdoor?
What about Coke machines?

Wendy – have you cheated in the past? If you are a cheat you are a loser not a winner. A cheat knows in their heart that they are useless people. Useless to anybody or any company.

Thats just the way life is.

Ogilvy would never cheat, just look at their comments on cheating: http://adsoftheworld.com/media.....dvertising

Thanks Eddie….I agree. Bring in ICAC!

The much bigger question than that of scam is this – why such a huge disconnect between the ‘award-winning’ creative work these agencies do for minimal exposure, and the ‘wallpaper’ creative work the clients actually place their media budget behind.

Who is right?

Have agencies lost the ability to convince clients of what is great (maybe because of our misguided drive to win awards), or have clients lost the will to fight for what is great.

Or is what runs good enough to keep everyone happy and not rock the boat. I’ve often thought many marketers approach advertising as if they are spending money already made (cost), not spending to make more money (investment).

And on top of all of this – why the mind-numbingly tiresome pitch parade that these marketers keep conducting only to get wallpaper produced at the end of the process. I’m sure fantastic award-worthy ideas are presented in the pitch, and get the agency the gig, but what the client really needed was an efficient production studio to execute the ads from overseas head office.

No wonder this industry is on the slippery slope.

I now come to this website for a laugh. It’s becoming the daily telegraph for ‘marketing.’

Aussie agencies are being shortlisted/winning awards and all you can do is pick apart their credibility? Just congratulate them and move on… Or find some overseas agencies to scrutinise, let’s stick up for our own!

Happens a lot in OOH each Feb / March. Outdoor owners get calls from creative agencies to erect an ad for a couple of hours so they can photograph it and submit it for awards. Morally corrupt

A day will come…not far off…when someone delivers a half decent metric that compares all the advertising mediums together and the entire industry will collapse in on itself.

I’m not over it – FAR from it. I have huge admiration that Mumbrella IS continuing to spotlight this issue. “Over it” is such a MSM approach. In that old, tired, dying medium, yes, any and every confected outrage reduces to the old “fish and chip wrapper” within days of paper-selling – and we are expected to all forget and move on.
But Mumbrella is an industry media reflecting on itself – surely those within this industry are genuinely interested in “award winning” advertisements – where they ran, the campaign strategy, – the whole “sesame seed bun’s” worth of details, in fact.
So, OK the ads did run – so why didnt those involved say so – with pride and transparency – when the question was first asked??? Could it be that they themselves feel slimy about their ethics? Hmm?

What I don’t understand is why ads that are worthy of international awards are deemed only fit for a single run to qualify? Surely if they are the best ads in the world the companies they represent should be happy having them published more widely? It makes a farce of both the ad-world and the people who hand out the awards.

Re Em,

I can’t believe all the cheat lovers coming out of the woodwork above. Its a sad day.

Here is an idea. Lets not bash Eddie Obeid for scamming the electorate and anyone else he could scam. Lets celebrate his entrepreneurial success story. Instead lets bash some guys from overseas in an attempt to assist them in building a stronger more honest moral code while the creative industry resumes its ideation back here in Sodom and Gomorrah.

I will say one thing, the support above from the creative industry for the cheaters really does highlight just how far our creative industry has fallen. Its rancid.

If I was an Australian client I would start putting overseas agencies on pitches until we can clean up this thirst for fraud and dishonesty that seems to be systemic here in Australia.

Hey Em, when you partner starts knocking off your neighbour, don’t chastise him or her, have a trophy made and celebrate his or her success together.

Rob (No. 17),
very, very good points that you make.

Ouch, thats gota hurt. LOL

As a Client I feel that this is much a reflection of bad clients as cunning agencies. If clients bought better work then these agencies wouldn’t need to lower themselves to such shit practices.
Glad none of them are my agency however, or I’d fire them.

Looks like an opportunity for these publications to add an “awards” loading…

@Jason 4.22pm:

When you say:

“If I was an Australian client I would start putting overseas agencies on pitches until we can clean up this thirst for fraud and dishonesty that seems to be systemic here in Australia.”

Which overseas agencies would that be? The overseas agencies that work in markets that don’t scam awards shows?

If you think such a market exists, please let me know. I’ve judged in every major show and I’m telling you that this is NOT an Australian issue: it’s a global one.

Australia is a bit scammier than some markets, and quite a bit cleaner than many others. That’s an opinion borne from studying tens of thousands of entries over the last decade. Feel free to refute with your own informed opinion though, of course.

So many astroturfers infecting this thread. Decision makers client side need to take a good long hard look at their precious marketing budgets. Traditional business models in effect here guys. Agencies squandering their clients’ cash on their own self gain. Creating this so called masterpiece of an ad and then running it once is like a defence contractor manufacturing the most effective machine gun for their client (say The Army) and spending so much that the client receives only one bullet. CFO’s, client side, need to understand what their marketing budgets are being spent on.

AdGuy:

Good point, it will be tricky or as you suggest possibly impossible. Read it more as passion for a better way.

Out if curiosity, given your tenure, have you yourself ever cheated? If so am curious to hear your thoughts. Very few people who have commented over the last few weeks have confessed to cheating themselves. More over, if not critical, they have suggested its OK, or to leave things as they are.

I am keen to hear from a cheat about how they feel when winning a fraudulent award.

Have you cheated AdGuy. You must have won a few to be a judge.

Obviously JWT has enough margins and manpower on the J&J business to invest in the production, media placement and award fees for these one-offs.
I don’t think they will be asking for a fee adjustment in the next couple of years.
Or for an extension of deadlines citing insufficient creative resourcing on the business.

You clearly don’t remember Eastwood and the Manly Daily episode.

The biggest shame here is not that the ads ran once, making them eligible for entry.

The shame is they didn’t run as a massive marketing campaign. Imagine how much better everyone’s lives would be if that Combantrin thing was on the TV as opposed to whatever ‘what’s new’ shit they were forced to run.

Don’t discourage scam, encourage running it for real. It doesn’t just help sales, it helps stop people switching off whenever they see an irritating ad.

And for the marketers: Newsflash. Nobody gives a shit about your product. Sell it well.

@Jason 5.27PM

When I was a junior/midweight creative, I did a few scam jobs. I’ve always been motivated by real work that makes an impact out in the world, rather than just in the jury room… but back then I was impatient to make my mark and while I did my best on real paying jobs – I found that with the clients I had the best I could do was a local ‘bronze’ level.

ok, but I wanted to flex my muscle and get noticed. Print, Radio was where I played and won. But only with clients who paid. They may have been very marginal clients who didn’t pay much, but they always knew (and liked) what they were running.

Since I’ve been in the position where I could genuinely influence the direction of the agency and the output and the philosophy, I’ve had a strict no scam rule.

Haven’t entered print in years. Why? Because it’s a fake category and none of the works is real. And print is borderline irrelevant now to any marketer outside of fashion, beauty and watches. So it’s a waste of effort if you want to promote a brand.

my agency focuses on real paying work for real paying clients, and we win more than our fair share of awards. I think anyone scamming print at a senior level in a proper agency is pretty sad tbh. It’s lazy and holds no relevance to your client’s brands and what they’re trying to achieve, but also for your own career.

Would I hire you just because you’ve got a few gold lions for pretend ads in a marginal medium? No, I wouldn’t.

Show me proper integrated thinking on proper brands, or GTFO. My clients want work that will make their brands properly famous and relevant. Clever and cute print doesn’t do that, sorry.

But you know what? I look at someone scamming in print like I’d look at a bodybuilder in a Pro competition who uses steroids. Everyone’s doing it. Which doesn’t make it right, it just makes it a contest full of people breaking the rules. Most of the other categories are pretty clean. Sure, like all contests you’ll get the odd cheat… but mostly you’re seeing and judging real work.

Hi Mumbrella team, from your IP address I can see you are working from a boring industry publication full of journalists who can not secure jobs in the main stream media.

Well said Rob. Be great if clients had more confidence to get behind clever, edgy work.
Award shows are like fashion shows, the catwalk of advertising, not the everyday stuff on the department store racks. It’s a beauty contest. It’s an opportunity to show our wares, to inspire agency and clients to push harder. Clients are starting to take note.
Get over it Mumbrella, it is what it is.

No Alex.

Could be time to start a weekly wrap up post which is top 5 agencies commenting on Mumbrella.

Bruised ego index?

Alex, your company has set up a public forum allowing anonymous feedback. If you want to start naming the IP addresses and agencies you need to change your comments forms to be registered users. Your numbers of comments will dwindle quickly, loosing fuel to your topical reporting, so I guess you will keep things as they are.

@alex Hayes This wouldn’t be the first time mumbrella has used the thinly vieled threat of knowing a readers I.P address. All you need to do is scan the comments that are contrary to mumbrella’s opinion and it is usually followed by; “well judging by your I.P…. The selective use of free press. I suspect, it would be rather revealing to have access to all the I.P’s from the comments of this blog. Would be interesting to see how many came from mumbrella’s own offices.

While I applaud someone ‘calling them out’ so to speak, I know full well this practice exists in the print entries from every country. Particularly the UK, Brazil and many parts of Asia.

However, the number of times an ad ran doesn’t make it scam. If the client has approved it, signed a letter and the ad has run once, twice or even four times, it’s eligible for entry.

Take this years Grand Prix winning ‘GAYTM’ machines. How many machines did they build? Should that be revoked because it wasn’t a national campaign? No, and I’ll tell you why.

Print is dead, only true, top-to-bottom integrated campaigns work. Yes, every marketer wants to see their idea in print, but the only relevant media left is outdoor.

Look at the size of the Sydney Morning Herald these days.