Business

Saturday October 10, 2009

The pursuit of creative awards


JWT regional executive creative director (South-East Asia) Tay Guan Hin and Taproot India founder and chief creative officer Agnello Dias are two of the foreign judges for this year’s Kancil Awards – the country’s premier advertising creative award show. StarBizWeek emailed them some questions on awards, scam ads and jury selection.

StarBizWeek: Are creative awards necessary for the advertising industry? Why or why not?

Tay Guan Hin: Creative awards are created to inspire, invigorate and reward the best creative work done annually. It’s a barometer to see how well or badly the industry is doing. It’s a great benchmark to measure Malaysia’s creative standards compared to the rest of the world. Most importantly, it helps to recruit potential talent into the industry because of the publicity it generates.

Agnello Dias: Awards are necessary for any industry where the evaluation of the output is subjective. This is true of the entertainment industry as well. Banking or information technology, on the other hand, produces output that can be evaluated objectively and their fiscal results become the sole yardstick of excellence. Therefore in the advertising industry and the entertainment industry a common benchmarking by peers is necessary to constantly evaluate our progress.

Is the emphasis on awards as a way to attract creatives and clients to one’s agency bordering on unhealthy?

Tay: Everyone wants to win, that’s human nature. If an agency has provided the entry requirements as stipulated in the rules of the award show, it should be counted as a legitimate entry. They shouldn’t be penalised for doing so well. Emphasis on award shows is just one aspect of proving how good agencies are. Effectiveness, like at the Effie or Media awards, is also taken into consideration.

Agnello: Firstly, what is broadly referred to as the “advertising” awards actually started out as awards for creative excellence. Creativity is only one part of advertising, it is not the whole of advertising. Most creative award shows recognise the creative part of advertising.

Then, of course, there are marketing award shows, effectiveness shows, strategic planning papers, etc which are for the whole of our business. What is unhealthy is the disproportionate amount of spotlight the creative awards get and that should be corrected.

But to be fair, one never hears creative people raising a hue and cry if an Effie winner is not “creative” enough like it happens the other way around.

Let’s face it, the decathlete, the pentathlete and the triathlete are better all-around athletes than the 100-metre sprinter but it’s the latter who grabs most the spotlight. The medio is a more complete footballer than the centre forward, and the bassist/keyboardist is the one who holds the band together, not the lead vocalist or the lead guitarist. Yet in all these cases, the latter are always glamourised more than the former. The truth is, purist pursuits will always score over all rounded ones. That’s life.

Is it true that the majority of “scam ads” (ads created specifically for award shows) sent to international shows come from Asia?

Tay: This is a very sensitive topic which I will approach with extreme caution. The comment that “majority of scam ads sent to international shows are from Asia” will hurt lots of Asian agencies which have done lots of good honest creative work.

This is an unfair statement as other countries also have their fair share. Just because our budgets are smaller and we have less global business, our work tends to be for local and smaller brands. Unfortunately, to the western mentality in an international show, if an Asian brand is something they have not heard of, they consider the brand not big enough.

For example: Telekom Malaysia (local) vs British Telecom (global). There are many smaller/local brands with smaller budgets that do great work simply because they need to stand out in their marketplace. Sometimes just doing one great creative piece of work can generate the talk-ability needed without spending a huge amount of media spend in today’s world through the use of Internet social media.

Agnello: I have no idea if this is true and I don’t think I ever will because the definition of scam varies from market to market, award show to award show and, most importantly, from journalist to journalist.

What do you think of the One Show’s decision to impose tough penalties for scam ads?

Tay: Every show has its own standards and imposing tough penalties is their way to weed out this issue. Besides the One Show, D&AD and New York Festivals have also announced their own regulations.

I think that the penalties are very strong perhaps the ad that started it all had such an emotional connection to 9/11. Besides penalising the agencies, shouldn’t the judges themselves be penalised for awarding that ad in the first place? Where is the responsibility of the organisers and the jury members when something like this happens? So for me, everyone from organisers to judges to agencies should all take full responsibility should this episode arise again.

Agnello: If it was either never created, created but never approved, or created and approved but never run in the eligible time period, then no penalty is too tough.

Recently there were some differences of opinion in terms of judge selection for the Kancil Awards. Do award shows generally choose judges who are ranked highly at recent creative shows, and would it really matter if judges are not from this select group?

Tay: Generally, judges are picked because they have done good work in the past. The judges must be respected by their peers; otherwise, to earn the right to sit on the judging panel becomes meaningless.

In every judging panel I sit, I learn something. No matter how long you have been in the business or how many awards you’ve won, each panel is different in their unique perspective. However, if the goal this year is to get a new perspective of the work and involve as many executive creative directors to learn from this experience, then it has achieved its objective. Those who may not have done well in the past can learn from those who have.

Since it’s a local show, it’s in everyone’s best interest to lift up the overall standard of their industry. Even in Cannes, a global award show, I don’t even know how good some of the judges are. Yet, we still submit, hoping to win a Lion.

Agnello: I do not know about these differences, but I do think performance at recent award shows should be a factor, not criteria.

The 2009 Kancil Awards will be held in Kuala Lumpur on Oct 30.

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