Who's award is it, anyway?
Background
When the award shows in Cannes were over, a fervent conversation had just begun. The following post was written in response to the debacle to show our support of Michael Lebowitz' position and to suggest ways we all -- especially SoDA -- could be actively engaged in a solution.
Who's Award Is It, Anyway?
Credit often seems unfairly distributed during the major award shows, most recently at Cannes. One of our SoDA members, Big Spaceship, felt largely unrecognized for their contributions to the award-winning HBO “Voyeur” campaign. BBDO’s creative leadership took a simplistic position: “We are the agency; they are the production company. What’s the big deal?”
To their credit, BBDO organized a lot of staff and engaged a team of talented vendors to implement a clever idea; it was executed beautifully across a broad range of media. For that they won a bunch of awards. And why not?
Well, they should not have been so dismissive, because times are a-changin'.
There is certainly pent up frustration over this issue. When Big Spaceship founder, Michael Lebowitz, spoke out publicly about the incident, we heard a roar of responses. His words hit home with all types: smaller shops that partner with big advertising and then go unnamed as well as the unseen specialists in all corners of our industry whose work turns so many campaigns into award-winners. Since there are so many people in this business still telling "war stories" of award-shows-past, there is clearly a problem.
On one hand, it comes down to common courtesy: a matter of taking good care of “your team” so they are there the next time you need them. It’s also a matter of valuing the rare level of intuition and inventiveness necessary to extend any campaign idea onto the new and ever-evolving interactive stage.
On the other hand, you should simply know who you're hiring. So me digital shops are production companies, set up to slave to agencies for most or all of their new business. But others, like Big Spaceship, are definitely not.
Lebowitz wrote, “To qualify us as a production company is to sell short the tremendous amount of insight required to take a traditional piece of media and put it out into the world in a natively digital way."
Michael is right. For now, it takes specialties and skills only available outside the general agencies to make the leap to digital. And as the ad world becomes more integrated, more networked and more complicated, collaboration will be all the more necessary and all the more critical.
Let's fix it
SoDA was established to provide a single voice for the broad spectrum of shops within the digital industry. We’re here as a collective of CEOs willing to contribute our time and effort to clear up or lend assistance to issues that are “uniquely digital.”
Our membership includes all types of digital agencies: from independent, direct-to-brand operations to studios that were set up specifically to provide digital services under the general agencies.
Is the conflict over award credits uniquely digital? Not on it’s own. But it has been recurring so often around digital projects that it has become a real barrier between traditional and digital groups.
If BBDO has an out, it’s that the award shows are broken. These shows face an increasingly difficult job of identifying and categorizing what is “digital” in the ad business. Digital work is innately pervasive, so a single category, like “Radio” or “Outdoor,” is not going to solve the problem. And a lot of linear, otherwise traditional media is paraded as “digital” just because it appeared online, which is a denigration of what is truly unique and valuable about our work.
On top of the awards conundrum, there are so many non-digital agencies pretending to “be digital” that the landscape is becoming emotionally charged. This is not only misleading, but wasteful. We look forward to the day when traditional agencies take their gains, not from pretending to “do it all,” but from leveraging their cleverness and wisdom in finding, hiring and being able to integrate the work of their digital partners. These are relationships that should not be hidden, but flaunted.
We can help in two ways
First, the members of SoDA will work with organizers of any major awards program to address the increasingly challenging problems they must cope with in categorizing and recognizing top digital work. The group unanimously agreed at our most recent all-member meeting in Vegas that this is a difficult problem, but is an issue that festers and is too divisive to remain as it is. We have 18 truly digital agencies and their past experience to bring to bear in helping to craft a solution.
Second, we are meeting with the AAAA and other major industry groups to discuss ways we can work together toward the overall betterment of the industry. Our members have organized into committees to address industry ethics and best practices, among other things; much of this work will naturally address the relationship between digital and traditional agencies.
It is part of our commitment to share or publish the results of our work with anyone in our business that might benefit from it. We see conversations with the ad industry groups as a mutually beneficial step toward reconciling or eliminating the current tension. So far, they’ve been very supportive.
This article is intended to speak openly about the problem, so we can move effectively toward a solution. We hope it helps.
Jay Wolff
president | odopod
vice chair | SoDA board of directors
