Last summer, agency DM9 won big at Cannes for their Whirlpool campaign. The case study included a news segment from CNN Brasil that was completely fake. The TED Talk that was part of their entry was fake, too. The testimonials, all fakeeee. By the end of it, three Cannes Lions were returned, the CCO resigned, and I think there was a spattering of LinkedIn posts about integrity.
This is the spot:
It is pretty damn good.
But these awards are all a little bit fake anyway. You make the real campaign for the client, then you make the awards version. (and the awards version has a more compelling narrative, more gritty footage, the stuff that felt a little too risky for the real spot). I don't think my preferred version of a brand campaign spot has ever gone live, but it’s definitely been submitted as part of an awards package. (That’s kinda the whole point of a director’s cut.)
The awards system rewards the case study. Not the campaign that lives in real life.
We’ve now built an entire incentive system around awards and then clutch our pearls when people optimize for winning them. Agencies sell creative work. Awards are the proof that the creative work was good. If the proof can be manufactured more cheaply than the work itself, someone is going to manufacture the proof. That's just how incentives work.
The people most affected aren't the ones who got caught in this weird situation. They're the creatives who made real work, for real clients, and actually had impact. They watched a fabricated campaign win at Cannes while their project never even had a case study budget. I think it’s important to celebrate work, even if it wasn’t “award winning.” Here’s one spot I’m loving this week from Etsy:
Xx, Caitlin
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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