Shortlisted Australian Cannes Lions ads ran once, in local parenting mag
An ad created by JWT Sydney for Johnson & Johnson which was shortlisted for this year’s Press Lions in Cannes, ran just once in a free local parenting magazine, Mumbrella’s Australian site has revealed.
Readers had raised questions about JWT’s campaign for J&J’s Banlice which made the shortlist for the Press category in Cannes.
The tip-offs came after Mumbrella revealed yesterday that ads entered into the award show by JWT for J&J’s Band-Aid only appeared in the same edition of The Rouse Hill Times as controversial Bronze winning McDonald’s executions.
The newspaper is understood to be News Local’s cheapest advertising outlet.
JWT today confirmed to Mumbrella the two ads, called “Bridge” and “Cable Car”, ran in free parenting magazine Sydney’s Child, which has an audited circulation of 117,000 and is part of a national network of localised Child magazines, in February. The agency said it also ran as a transit outdoor execution.
A spokesperson for JWT Australia claimed the reason the campaign ran in just one place was that it was “extremely targeted to ensure maximum ROI”.
Based on normal agency and photography costs, it is likely that the cost of producing the ad greatly exceeded the cost of running it in the magazine.
The spokesperson said: “The campaign was developed as a very targeted back to school February campaign, and was only placed in Sydney’s Child Magazine – not national – because of low media spend, and the fact that Sydney is the product’s largest target market due to population. It ran once because it was a ‘back to school’ campaign and it ran in the February ‘back to school’ edition of Sydney’s Child.”
The ads are the fourth set entered by Australian agencies in this year’s Cannes competition to come under scrutiny, with Saatchi & Saatchi’s Silver Lion winning work for Panasonic, DDB’s Bronze winning McDonald’s executions and JWT’s Band-Aid work also in the spotlight.
The issue of “scam” ads is a growing one for the advertising industry, with claims that some work is created to win awards, rather than solve clients’ marketing problems. A hallmark of scam advertising is when work for a major brand appears only once, in a low cost publication, close to an entry deadline.
A former scammer in Singapore – one of the region’s most notorious countries for scam – revealed the processes behind scam in an interview with Mumbrella Asia last year.
JWT claims the Banlice executions were in response to a client brief from Johnson & Johnson for the brand. JWT said that it booked the ad directly “due to low media spend”. J&J’s media agency of record is OMD.
At the time of posting, Mumbrella had been unable to confirm what size the ads ran in the magazine, but a half-page advert in Sydney’s Child costs $6,501 including tax according to its rate card.
JWT has also said an ad for Johnson & Johnson worming brand Combantrin which won a Bronze Lion in the inaugural Cannes Health awards this year, ran online with the Google Network and also ran on Seven in Queensland, “due to high product usage in this area”. However, an initial search by media monitoring service Ebiquity which covers all of Australia’s metro TV networks, has not uncovered the ad running.
Johnson & Johnson has refused to comment, referring inquiries from Mumbrella back to JWT.
Meanwhile, Mumbrella’s Australia site has still been unable to find evidence of Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney’s winning campaign for Panasonic in-car air conditioning.
Mumbrella recently held a video hangout on the issue of scam recently featuring the APAC chief creative officer of Sapient Nitro Andy Greenaway and the creative founder of Australian agency The Works Damien Pincus.
Alex Hayes
The cover up is always worse than the act.
Soon they’ll be forced to admit the truth. Expect the ‘we’re so sorry, we are dedicated to doing first rate work for our clients, this won’t happen again.’
Which of course means nothing in the court of public opinion. An agency that goes to such extremes as lying to a journalist comes across as just being sorry for being caught when it finally all comes out.
ReplyHuge plaudits to the Mumbrella team for pursuing these cheats with rigour, journalistic integrity and emotional restraint. I particularly like the reference to the photography cost. If you’re a client of one of these agencies who recently paid (full freight) for a shoot by the same photographer, you may well have paid for the scam ad shoot as well. feel free to ask some difficult questions of the MD.
ReplyPaul F makes a great point….scam also encourages the scamming of legitimate clients.
Suppliers are asked to contribute their services to scam projects for free….the agencies tell them that they will be taken care of by giving them real paying jobs the next time around. So when it is time to award a photo shoot or pick a production house for a real piece of work and a paying client, are the agencies picking the best value or the supplier that did them a favour?
This is the start point for corruption. Clients need to speak up.
ReplyI remember when I first got into advertising back in the mid 80’s reading ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ by David Ogilvy. I was inspired by how great advertising like the famous VW campaign had been the zeitgeist of our times and how great advertising was so important that it was often used as a current cultural reference in modern parlance. Great ads stood the test of time, being memorable many years later. I learned from my copywriting mentor Chris Kyme that ‘if your ad can’t work with three different executions of the same idea, it probably isn’t strong enough’.
Whatever happened to REAL, good and strong advertising that can stand on it’s own two feet and touch, move & inspire people?
It’s an embarrassment to an industry that is already quite self-congratulatory enough, that we need to stoop to this low level of scam ads just to scratch out some false recognition like chickens in a farmyard, for what is, in the end, simply flogging products to the public.
The fact that awards shows like Cannes are willing to effectively condone this type of activity devalues the awards and the whole industry.
Sad days.
ReplyWell done Mumbrella. A big silence from the other trades. Their loss, as I am sure you are building trust and credibility (and readability) while they are posting unedited press releases and toadying to their award show partners. Keep it up.
ReplyCongratulations on an excellent and timely debate.
I think the difficulty with the ‘scam’ question is that it’s being addressed as a black & white issue. It’s not. There’s plenty of grey here. Unfortunately, the definition of a ‘scam’ ad is not at all clear. Indeed, some of the other links here question the legitimacy of an award-winning campaign that only ran once. Does this make it a scam? Not necessarily. If it adheres to the entry rules, then surely it’s not, by definition, a scam.
As Andy Greenaway points out there are also ‘initiative’ ads. Should these be defined as scams? I don’t think so. Actually, I think initiative work should positively be encouraged. It’s good for our clients’ businesses, it’s good for agencies, it’s good for creative teams. As an industry it’s increasingly important to be proactive on our clients’ behalf both in terms of communication as well as business-building innovation. So, where do you draw the line?
Perhaps it is simply a question of the award rules – if a piece of work conforms to those rules, it’s not a scam by definition. However, if we do feel as an industry that the current rules are not sufficiently tight i.e. the rules can be bent by only running a piece of work once, fine, tighten them up. Given the eye-watering entry fees I have no doubt that Cannes makes enough money to enforce tighter entry criteria and investigative diligence.
Btw, the ‘Scammies’ suggestion is already being done (kind of) in the form of the ‘Chip Shop Awards’. Worth a look.
ReplyS
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