Update on Adrian Miller’s D&AD Press judging
Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia ECD Adrian Miller is in London for the D&AD judging and is writing about the experience on the Press Jury for CB Asia.
Entering the Olympia on day two, I was greeted by a rather shocking sight. 1267 entries had been whittled down to a paltry 45 entries.
One of the British judges walked up and down the single wall of remaining print ads and said, “we can cut this down to about 11”.
Now I’m all for quality control, but this seemed a little over zealous. Thankfully he was sidetracked by a cup of tea and forgot that he cracked that joke.
The scrabble judge brought up his resentment of scrabble ads again. Iwas beginning to think that he really sucked at board games and wasfeeling insecure.
Eventually group discussion time arrived. Never have I discussed ads insuch detail. Every detail of every print ad was pulled apart, analyzedand compared.
We discussed people’s motivation for making certain print ads. We evendiscussed what might have been written on the brief that led to the adin question. It was like an episode of CSI. Only instead of blood typeswe were discussing typefaces and logo sizes.
I stepped back from the discussion for a moment and thought what afucking insane job I have. Out in the real world, people are dying andhere we are comparing which sales message is better.
I then enthusiastically jumped back in and yelled, “How can that be adouble-page newspaper spread. The headline lies flat bang in thegutter”.
Our 45 print ads soon became 32 print ads. Out of that we picked 9 silver nominations. Next, we voted on the yellow pencil.
The general consensus was that most of the ads felt like scams. Butthey were rather good scams. And the ones that weren’t scams felt likescams too. So it was a no win argument really.
We settled on the fact that we were the best jury ever to judge atDA&D, took a group photograph, hugged and went for a drink at thenearest pub. Where, I might add, we continued to discuss what exactly ascam was. After 5 minutes that got boring and we started talking aboutthe giant particle accelerator beneath the Franco-Swiss border.
Lastly, a judge on the poster jury was heard saying, “This isn’tCannes. It’s D&AD”. While this might be a blindingly obviousstatement to most people, it does raise an important point: D&AD isfundamentally a British show masquerading as an international one.
Enter at you own risk.
9 Comments
Good last point. i stopped enterring based on that. ads that have gained gold and silver at cannes and clios etc get absolutely zero in DandAD…
-P. Beckett
yeah adrian – just tell the british judge that’s why we have stopped sending work (and money) to D&AD
What is a scam?
By definition, a scam is a confidence trick or deception. So, a scam ad is one that contains a level of deception, which may manifest itself in any number of ways. A director’s cut / agency’s preferred version of an TVC. An ad that the agency rather than the client paid for A big brand-looking ad that really ran once at a fifth the size in a publication no-one has ever heard of. The moment there is a deception in your work – when it tries passing itself off as something it isn’t – then it’s a scam.
And to the Brits’ credit, it should be dealt with mercilessly because it fucks all of us by tainting our industry.
This raises a few points:
This isn’t exactly news is it. It always has been and always will a British show, no amount of PR spiel will change this, but b/c of the advertising world’s outdated inferiority complex about British advertising we keep entering like lemmings.
The remark that all the print looks like scam? That’s because it fucking well is. And by scam I mean ads produced solely to win at shows. It’s a wide definition of what scam is but seems to be what most people mean when they use the term. Maybe the client signed it off after the agency produced it but it certainly wasn’t a big media spend in a national newspaper. It’s pretty bloody obvious when there is a beautifully crafted dps for highlighters, torches, Amnesty etc. But even the Harvey nicks stuff falls into this category. I lived in London for 4 years and never saw a single print ad that got into D&AD in the wild.
The above applies to every award show not just D&AD, the brits just think of themselves as the world ad police. ‘We’ll catch those dirty scammers Fuck Yeah!’
At every award show the print category is all chemically enhanced ads, and everyone is doping. It’s a bullshit system that arose from award winning creatives getting the big gigs. But what would you rather see in someone’s book. An award winning campaign for highlighters or a Tap project/Lynx jet/Halo integrated campaign? In a few years they won’t even have print in award shows and that will be the end of this boring groundhog day debate, thank fuck.
The english judges say that every year. And every year our ads win. Yes they judge it to higher standards than other awards but our print is of a higher standard so it still gets up.
The english judges just like to be able to sit there and take the moral high ground at D&AD because it is “their show”.
Nice write up Adrian.
if the brits wanted to stop all these adscammers they should have stopped a man who shares their nationality but goes by a surname of a neighboring nation. this bloke created the first scam ad of the world – a print ad for a street food noodle stand beside the raffles hotel singapore. i guess it’s too late now.
dealt with mercilessly? if it was, the print section of the book would be empty. The british stuff that gets in is just as scammy as the asian stuff except that it is for bigger clients. It’s still work created without a brief with the sole object of winning awards.
You guys are pathetic.
What’s stopping you from doing pro-active work?
I think you probably had done some but because it’s so bad it never won any awards.
Awards are fun. Stop being a sore looser
Yes, well said 1.25.
AWARDS ARE FUN.
Not let’s all get back to work and have some fun.