An award in the trunk

Ford Figo uproar is a reminder that ad agencies care less about their clients' business - and more about awards

If you have been following the advertising industry in India, you will know this is precisely the time when such advertisements seem to crawl out of the woodwork. Some overzealous creative hand comes up with what he thinks is a Cannes/One Show idea, puts together an ad or two with or without his client's approval, and finds some godforsaken publication to print the ads, which would pave the way for an entry in the next awards function. Earlier, no one cared if such work was published; in fact, there was no way to know. So they came and went; found a place in awards ceremonies and sometimes even picked up a bit of shiny metal.

In short, they have been around forever. The industry even has a name for such work - December advertising - though you may bump into them anytime between November and February. By that yardstick, the recent Ford Figo ads were an exception: they appeared at the fag end of March, but just in time to pick up the entry pass for the advertising jamboree scheduled to be held between April 5 and 6 at the Zuri White Sands in Goa.

This time there was another difference. The agency folks apparently hadn't realised that, in the age of the internet, you can't really hide your dirty secrets. The relevant team was probably in a tizzy, wondering where these ads could be released. Perhaps, they came up with the idea too late in the day - and, since a print release would have meant cutting it very fine, uploading them to the internet seemed like the best way out.

Really, which world do they live in?

Indeed, what in the world were these guys at JWT really thinking? The Figo touts luggage capacity as its USP, and all these ads carried the tagline "Leave your worries behind with Figo's extra-large boot". Does the agency sincerely believe that car buyers think, if their cars have a huge boot, that will eradicate all their worries - real or imaginary - forever? Or that, just as he/she slips behind the driving wheel of his/her Figo, he/she will be transported to the very happening world of a Silvio Berlusconi or a Michael Schumacher, or even a Paris Hilton? 

Frankly, if it hadn't been for the controversy - and the timing - no one would have remembered these ads. They are plain silly. For those who came in late, we are talking about a series of online ads for Ford's small car brand Figo, purportedly created and released by some young chaps at JWT, India's largest advertising agency by size and part of the WPP group, without the knowledge and consent of their seniors. There were three ads in the series: the most controversial had a caricature of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with three scantily clad women bound and gagged in his car's boot; another featured Formula One ace Michael Schumacher and showed his rivals, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso, stuffed in the Figo's boot; the third featured a Paris Hilton look-alike hauling along the Kardashian sisters.

Once the Ford Figo ads went viral and were panned both in India and abroad, the agency conveniently washed its hands of the campaign. It said the ads hadn't been intended for publication, and that they were circulated after being uploaded on an industry website without the knowledge or okay of senior executives at the agency. The agency promptly went and sacked a whole bunch of people from the creative department. 

As I said before, scam advertising isn't a new monkey, and it is pretty easy to spot really. Two most common ways, industry insiders point out, are to look for the key number (a sort of identification tag for every ad released) and whether the ad runs into the gutter space (if it's a spread). A bona fide ad will be designed to stay away from the gutter. There are 20 other signs. So why do they persist? Simple: those overzealous people everywhere - among the suits as much as in the creative departments - who seem to believe that the job of an ad is to win awards for the agency. Period. Whether they help sell the client's brand is secondary. Also, as an award show organiser, you don't really want to forgo the neat sum you pick up as entry fee.

Of course, this problem is not peculiar to India, and they are more are rampant than you would care to believe. It is also a fact that the industry has tried various ways of dealing with scam ads - such as instituting awards that reward effectiveness - which means the agency and the client have to present a proper case study with numbers that show an ad has delivered. There have been sporadic efforts to award unpublished work, or have a haute couture category for work created in a vacuum. Then there are efforts to put together a jury that is competent enough to pick up the signals.

Evidently, all this isn't working. A starting point could be to have a zero-tolerance policy towards agencies with even one proven offence. Just ban them from the awards.