Sir John Hegarty: Ban scam agencies from awards shows like sport bans doping stars
Agencies involved in creating scam work should be banned from advertising awards shows in the same way that professional athletes are prevented from participating in sporting competitions when they have been caught taking drugs, adland legend Sir John Hegarty has told Mumbrella.
Putting scam on a par with doping, the BBH co-founder said: “Scam is my bête noire. I think it’s a tragedy and I liken it to drugs in sports. If we don’t kick this habit, we will undermine the awards that we have.
“Shows have got to be more proactive in how they weed out scam and how they penalise those that create it. They should say to agencies, if you do that [scam] you will not be able to enter for the next three years.”
Asked if the volume of scam work was dropping off due to awards shows tightening up entry criteria and judging processes following a number of high-profile scandals that exposed fake work in recent years, he replied: “No, it’s still the same. What are we doing? It’s making a laughing stock of the industry.
“Just ban them. But they won’t do that because it’s a money-making machine. They are killing our industry and killing creativity. The Tour de France had to come down very heavily on drug cheats and we have got to do the same. We need to view scam like it is a drug.
The way our industry will get better is when better people do better work and better clients see it so that they say ‘wow, why don’t I have a bit of that – it really did work’.”
Pointing to the revival of television, which had been written off by many as a dead medium, as proof that an industry could reinvent itself – Hegarty said: “Television has been revived because it invested in better writing and better directors.
“That’s what we need to do in our industry. But if, instead, we are doing scam that nobody sees then it is doing nothing to help us.
“The television industry has moved forward because people have seen great programming and gone ‘god, I could do that’. So that’s why I get on my high horse about this issue.”
Couldn’t agree more. There also needs to be a lot more scrutiny on who originated the idea. I know of a large media agency who have ‘appropriated’ creative agency partner or client originated ideas as their own. I’m fact they make up a large part of their creds and work section on their website as well as from part of agency of the year award entries.
And punish creative agencies who remove people from the credits or switch them out with people who didn’t work on it, so that they can hide the fact that the award winners have since quit / been let go, or that the award winners were freelancers.
When that happens at a exec senior level, sure part of the game, but when it happens at a junior/mid level, you’re punishing the careers of up & comers to simply save face.
Because I know of a large creative agency that appropriated a large media agency’s ideas for a large global brand and waltzed away with many local and international awards (and probably lots more new business).