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.
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.
Advertisers telling lies? Never.
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.
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….
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.
Good start here. Did the author ever work under [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy]
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.
This is so disgusting.