The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

You might be fooling some people, but you’re not fooling the rest of us.

You’re tragic.

You’re part of the reason our industry has lost the respect of business.

The only thing worse is the industry accepts it.

Justifies it.

Say’s things like, “we’re showing business what we could do for them”.

It doesn’t.

You can’t show business what we can do for them when you decide on the problem, the solution and validate it’s success by the number of creative awards it achieved … creative awards given to you by people who have a vested interest in keeping the whole charade going.

Adland has a lot it can offer the World.

It can help business grow and helping society thrive.

It contains thousands of incredibly talented people who can genuinely make a lasting difference to millions of people.

But scam fucks over that talent.

Scam is about selfishness not selflessness.

Winning a bunch of little statues for fake work doesn’t make you a genius.

Winning a bunch of little statues for fake work doesn’t earn you respect from business.

At least not business that’s worth being respected by.

By all means do ‘spec work’ for a client that you think is good. By all means do ‘spec work’ for a client and enter it into awards … but have the decency to admit it’s a ‘showcase’ rather than something real.

If you do that, I’m cool with it being judged.

If you do that, I’m cool with it being awarded.

It means it’s being celebrated for it’s ingenuity and craft which might, just might, influence a client to change their mind about what they could do in the future.

Or better yet, create your own product and do work for that and show the World you’ll put your money where your mouth is, rather than leach off someone else’s hard work and risk.

But let’s face it, the companies who continually invest in scam don’t want to do either of that.

They want it easy.

They don’t want to run the risk their self defined ‘brilliance’ isn’t so brilliant.

The reality is the people who adopt that approach are lazy and delusional … however, it reaches a whole new level of insanity when they then go and promote the fact some businessmen named them über-influential on the basis they won more awards than any other agency – regardless of the fact that most of those awards were for campaigns whose legitimacy is highly questionable.

Aren’t they embarrassed about that?

Don’t they know that they’re claiming something that was built on illusion?

Surely if they’re that influential, their everyday work would be shaking up the whole industry and city. But no, it appears influential simply means any campaign that has won an award, regardless that only 10 people and a creative jury saw it.

Doesn’t anyone care about substance any more?

Is the industry that happy to keep the delusion alive?