Competition-oriented ad campaigns criticised

Advertising industry leaders and experts in the UAE continue to advocate every criterion in the book to uphold professionalism. True, the most recent Dubai Lynx Awards showed a development in the standards of creativity in the region, as have international awards ceremonies such as the Cannes Lions. Yet, Dr Lance De Masi, President of the UAE Chapter of the International Advertising Association (IAA), told Emirates Business that many of the works participating in these awards were not widely known to the public because they were part of proactive campaigns approved by clients and were run in a limited public space for the purpose of participating in awards competitions.

This poses questions about ongoing challenges that are faced by the advertising industry and creative minds that inhabit the industry, including relations with clients, budgetary restraints, creative environment and bureaucratic processes involved in approving creative work. This newspaper asked industry experts, Anthony Dalton, Managing Director of BWM, Dubai; Reda Raad, Group Managing Director of TBWA\Raad; Nadine Ghoussoub, Managing Director of Team Y&R; and Guy Sinclair, Creative Director, Memac Ogilvy and Mather Dubai, for their opinions on these challenges.

—The industry has been discussing various challenges that confront creativity in this region. We see many campaigns with intriguing and unfamiliar ideas, but many are not clear. What is considered as a creative work?

Anthony Dalton: A truly great piece of creative work is something that first solves a business problem. To do so, it must be based on a proposition that captures a sharp and inspiring insight into the target market, it must be a simple and powerful idea that communicates the proposition, and finally it must be executed in a way that gets rid of anything that stands in the way of the clarity of the idea. The true challenge of a creative campaign is to generate enough momentum to allow clients to minimise media spend, and ultimately for the campaign to keep growing through consumer popularity long after clients stop spending money.

Nadine Ghoussoub: In today's world, when we areexposed to anything that is intriguing and unfamiliar, then it must be creative. We are living in the information age, where we are exposed to anything and everything. An age where our minds are opened in ways we never imagined possible. With this amount of knowledge and exposure, if something can still grab our attention long enough to allow us to form an opinion about it, then it must be new, interesting and different, and that's a byproduct of creativity.

Guy Sinclair: Good creative work is a piece of communication that is surprising, relevant and simple to understand. These days you can lose a potential consumer simply by being obtuse, irrelevant and formulated. Our job is not to communicate with others in our business but with the person on the street. The public isn't dumb. We feel an emotional contact with those brands that allow us to participate in the process of consuming. Consumers still want to be talked to and engaged with. As a consumer, I do too and that's what we need to remember, not that it will simply win an award.

Reda Raad: At TBWA\ RAAD we believe truly creative work is unexpected, relevant and disrupts the conventions that have become the norm in the advertising space. We also think that creative work can be intriguing and unfamiliar and such work can be effective too as it encourages the consumer to explore further.

—Why do clients tend to approve creative ideas that are meant for festival entries but do not use them as part of their campaigns?

Anthony Dalton: They often do it as a favour to their agency partners, and often the work is not required by the client because it doesn't solve a problem they have. The fundamental issue is that this should never happen. Any work that is produced purely for festival entries is by definition pathetic and brings this industry into disrepute. Award-winning work should always have an incredible return on investment story to underpin it. It should be a win for client and agency. If it's scam work for award entries only, then the creative departments should retire and open art galleries, then see if their work is good enough for anyone to buy to hang in their lounge rooms. If I was a client and my agencies put their best people and skills into solving fake briefs rather than giving me brilliant ideas to solve my real problems, then I'd fire them immediately.

Reda Raad: Let's be clear here. There are true 'scam' campaigns whereby a disreputable agency will simply create a campaign without ever working for a client, and then enter that campaign for an award. That's wrong, it should not happen and what's happened in this market is well documented and is now 'water under the bridge'. Then there are campaigns that are the result of proactive agencies simply stimulating their clients with ideas and executions of potential new work. We did this for our clients at Nissan for the Xterra SUV. They loved the work and yes, it won awards.

Nadine Ghoussoub: Again, I can't speak for other agencies' clients but at Y&R, every piece of work entered into the festivals has been part of our clients' campaigns.

Guy Sinclair: I can only speak on behalf of our clients and I can definitely say that every client that we entered into the awards had creative that was real and relevant to a strategy for communication for their respective brand. This is the one point that stood out strongest in the Lynx this year.

—Do you think that the current economic crisis and the low advertising budgets force agencies to compromise the creativity of the work by following the clients' directives rather than risking to lose those clients?

Anthony Dalton: No. This is used as an excuse by some agencies that simply aren't good enough. The global financial crisis and resulting lower budgets have created incredible opportunities for creative agencies to prove their worth. The greatest creative ideas result in a client needing to spend less money on their campaign, often requiring zero media budget. The stronger the idea, the less campaign spend is required. But this requires a completely different way of operating than the traditional agency model, so most agencies struggle to deliver on it. We have a model in place from international markets that is designed precisely to meet this need.

Guy Sinclair: Quite the contrary, you'll find that most of the awards won this year were actually done with very little money. The idea is king here and effectiveness is measured from the amount we engage with people, not the budgets that we spend on getting them to engage. The traditional media formats are now only a part of a bigger picture when communicating. Often the most effective creativity comes when we explore surprising alternatives. Small budgets sometimes sharpen the creative response by helping us to focus more on what's important.

Reda Raad: Absolutely not. Creativity is something that does not come with a direct agency price tag attached. There have been many examples of clients cutting budgets in terms of their media spend but they expect – and should always receive – the very highest creative work and ideas from an agency. It's our core offering.

Nadine Ghoussoub: One thing we have learnt from this crisis is the strength of our relationships with our clients. We have realised more than ever, the true meaning of partnership and teamwork. We all have the same objective and we all work towards it and although the crisis has given us many challenges, we work towards overcoming them together with the least amount of compromise.

—Creativity is expensive, whether in terms of hiring talent or in terms of value as an artwork. Is the crisis affecting the agency's ability to deliver creative work, pressurised by clients with tight budgets?

Anthony Dalton: Creativity is not expensive if it works. When you review campaign return on investment (ROI), it simply needs to justify itself. The challenge is to shift the often out-dated mentality of agencies and clients of this region away from the media percentage model. Many clients simply won't spend more than 20 per cent of any budget on producing creative ideas. They have a media dependent attitude and rely on media spend. Some of the most effective global campaigns of the last five years have invested much higher percentages of spend on creative ideas so they don't need to spend anything on media.

—Investing one million dollars in a creative idea has proven in some cases to generate more than $100 million (Dh67m) in media without paying a dollar for it. Is that expensive?

Nadine Ghoussoub: At Y&R, we learnt many years ago that creative ideas don't necessarily have to be expensive and that an environment that embraces and cultivates creativity will always attract the best talent who will willingly work almost for free.

Guy Sinclair: It's not about monetary value or costly resources, but more about how well the message is transmitted through the most effective / interactive communication channels.

—How do you measure the effectiveness of a creative? How are agencies dealing with the increasing demand to prove ROI?

Anthony Dalton: Great creativity is an ROI multiplier. Every brief we've ever worked on from any client, internationally or regionally, has had a clear ROI objective and measurement criteria set. It's absolutely critical for any agency to independently determine the ROI of every project. Whether that is hard sales data, consumer opinion, consideration measures or other brand research measures, it's essential for every project. We'll also often run creative testing of ideas or executions in the market so that a longer-term test and learn programme is implemented. The goal is to drive a mentality where the ROI of every dollar is constantly increased. We've proven how effective this can be in many markets.

Guy Sinclair: Ultimately, it is the consumer who measures the effectiveness of the communication through a changing attitude and behaviour towards the brand. Clients are extremely sophisticated in having access to information/data that captures the changes in these behaviours and their impact on the brand's performance.

Reda Raad: This is very topical as Coca-Cola is proposing a new advertising agency remuneration model. We at TBWA\RAAD believe that value-based compensation models are both beneficial to the agency and its clients. The current remuneration model is becoming outdated. Which other industry allows buyers to determine their pricing methodology? As our offering has gotten more complex and clients' reliance on us for bigger and better ideas has become greater, the concept of paying for value versus hours cannot be disputed. Value-based pricing, we believe is the way of the future.

—There is a suggestion that the level of creativity is higher in festivals than in real life because agencies only seem to incentivise good work during the preparations for festival entries. What is your comment?

Anthony Dalton: Agencies should incentivise great work that solves real problems 24/7, the best of which can be entered into festivals. Ultimately, each agency needs to make a decision: do they want to win clients over by showing boardrooms creative awards alone or do they want to show multiple case studies of campaigns with incredible ROI for clients, that also just happened to win awards? I know what I would want to see as a client, especially when budgets are tight.

Guy Sinclair: If the recent Lynx Awards are anything to go by, then we've seen a huge shift in that thought. Most of the awards were for new media in real situations with proven effectiveness. Worldwide creatives and agencies want to showcase their talent and often haven't the opportunity to do this. It's natural to want this, like a car manufacturer showing off their new concepts. However this is not a practice held by us. It's hard to create great creative ideas that work within the constraints of global guidelines or client expectations.

Reda Raad: [This is] absolute nonsense as far as TBWA\RAAD is concerned. We are judged by our clients for the consistency of our creative work over an extended period of time. We work on real client campaigns most of the time and should our work be good enough to win awards (and I'm pleased to say it consistently is), then all the better.

—Some of the most popular advertising campaigns are either a straight lift or 'inspired' by advertising campaigns abroad. Is this any reflection of lack of creativity in the region or agencies' reluctance to try something new?

Anthony Dalton: It's very easy to mimic great international work or to reach for a quick fix by creating generic work that could have been generated in any market. The real challenge is to base work on regional insights and create ideas that are anchored in themes and layers of the tradition and unique lifestyle of this region. That's what we aim for in our work.

Nadine Ghoussoub: I hope not. Y&R is an ideas agency. Ideas come from a lot of places and they come in different forms. We believe creative people need to be constantly exposed to new things and be able to live in an environment where they constantly feel inspired in order for them to think in new and different ways.

Guy Sinclair: The quality and level of the creative in the region has seen a tremendous boost in the past few years and I don't believe that we need to 'lift' anything from advertising campaigns that are originally created abroad. What we do in some cases, when we are working on a multinational brand, is work on the strategic platform or advertising idea that has been devised for international roll out. In these cases, we would add the local perspective and nuances that would make the communication even more relevant to our target audience.

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