Publicis Groupe instructs all of its agencies to not participate in advertising awards shows in 2018
June 21 2017, 7:34 am | | 23 Comments
Publicis Groupe will be sitting out the 2018 Cannes Lions festival. The reason? To save money.
New chief executive officer Arthur Sadoun (pictured) made his first dramatic mark on the holding company this week by forbidding all of its agencies around the world from participating in awards shows, trade shows or other paid promotional efforts for more than a year.
Agency networks in the Groupe include Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis Worldwide, BBH, Marcel, Fallon, MSLGROUP and Prodigious.
23 Comments
How to demotivate a lot of creatives.
But they’ve already fired the accountants?!?
http://www.adweek.com/agencyspy/we-hear-100-plus-layoffs-at-resources-as-publicis-groupe-automates-financial-services/125918
Quelle horreur!!
Going to have to spend twice as much in 3 years time hiring back all the creatives they lose.
A step in the right direction, although it is a shame they are doing it for themselves not their clients.
As for motivation, surely doing good work is in itself enough motivation for good creatives?
The whole industry should do this for one year.
Just to reset.
And I’m a ‘creative’ with lots of awards. I just think the industry, and the awards themselves, have been devalued in recent years. Too many agencies are working on two speeds – just get whatever crap the clients want done on the briefed jobs, and spend all of your time crafting the awards jobs.
I love the industry, and I fucking love awards, but we’re destroying all our credibility.
And before you say yeah yeah old has-been jaded creative blah blah, I am old but I’m not jaded. I honestly think we need to reset, to get our collective mojo back. I honestly, hand on heart, believe it would be best for the industry to focus on making great work that sells again – and may the best work win awards.
Let the brain and talent drain begin. While we shouldn’t be an industry so obsessed with metal, it is a reality that you need it as a creative to get better jobs, briefs and money.
Imagine you’re a young creative somewhere in the world who has a killer idea, but it will never be recognised. Or a woman who may want to have a kid in the next few years, but can’t pre-bank some awards so you have a job to come back to post baby.
Sure it may save the group money, but it will hurt a lot of careers.
The big problem is agencies working out how to charge for ideas and make money, not to just cut staff and costs.
1/ it’s for a year.
2/ they’re actually investing this to a group wide AI powered platform.
If you read it all it’s actually not saving money, it’s just making a choice to invest it differently. The proof will be in the pudding … if anything, they’ve put the pressure on themselves, Kudos to that.
Think of all the money they’ll save when all the top talent drains out to places where quality work is respected and admired. Savvy!
This is a move in the right direction only it there’s good follow through.
1-The money that’s saved doesn’t go to the bonus pool at the top.
2-It’s reinvested in retaining and rewarding the talents who are instrumental in delivering great work for their paying clients.
3-Introduce another creative competition that rewards creativity relevantly.
In the past, DY&R Asia Pac rewarded the best creative work (from Japan to New Zealand) for real clients -(judged by the regions MDs & ECDs). Winners got between USD5,000 to USD 15,000 cash.
The winning work was automatically eligible for the global Y&R awards where the prize money was up to USD50,000.
A winner could have two bites of the cherry.
For me-pocketing an extra USD10,000 as a junior earning USD24,000 was cool!
That was in the late 80s-early90s.
The genius of it was that the rewards for creativity was tangible. The recognition spurred proper competition. And the winners did not need to job hop for money.
But they could if they wanted to.
It was win-win for all.
Then in the mid 90s, New York decided to drop the internal awards and pump the cash to cannes as entry fees.
They started hiring scammers, clients started losing trust, cannes lost its shine.
Maybe the frogs actually got it right by stop drinking the Kool Aid.
And other networks will follow.
You rip out my heart. You break my spirit. You revolt me.
It’s a nice idea in principle, but I expect it will make a lot of creatives and planners uncertain about the career value they will gain being there.
That said, it’s better than the holding groups who put huge pressure on all their agencies to beat arbitrary award targets.
Why do you think quality work needs to win an award to be respected and admired?
Are you unable to pick it yourself unless some judge in a far flung land has done it for you?
Good work is good work.
My money says Publicis will be entering Cannes again next year.The year they’re talking about is most likely to be the ’12 mths’ from the end of this years Cannes to the start of next year’s Cannes.
Considering how many barely formed ideas, and completely unproven, not even in beta stage concepts seemed to have gotten up and won metal lately, not sure it’s a bad thing.
. . . Winner of the PR Lions Grand Prix
The problem is that the industry has got used to using awards as its metric for success. It’s a bold idea to withdraw from that, but it does risk Publicis agencies being (at least in the short term) overlooked by talent or pitches until it finds another way to demonstrate value in its creativity.
> investing this to a group wide AI powered platform.
haha what?
If all agencies only entered their great work, rather than entering work that should never have run, let alone have a hope in hell of winning an award – they’d save a bundle. This should then be put back to reward the talent who are doing the great stuff, and have money over for innovation to build a better business.
The money that is wasted on entering crappy work is scary.
Awards = endorsement of an abusive industry.
For every Cannes lion, someone hasn’t seen their family for weeks on end.
Awards make me sick.
(Coming from a multiple award winner)
So what most of you are saying is creatives only really care awards, so will go to an agency that’ll be entering awards next year?
How ridiculous. Good work is good work, regardless of awards. You creatives must have some serious inferiority complex to care so much about a piece of brass that, let’s face it are bought and not earned these days.
Working every second weekend on pitches or big projects doesn’t get you a payrise.
Getting that catalogue out the door on time, every time, doesn’t get you a payrise.
Making the 74th change to that concept that was once good, doesn’t get you a payrise.
Do 5 rounds on a brand launch, and being forced to make a heavily compromised manifesto, doesn’t get you a payrise.
You can only get a payrise if you do a good ad, and a good ad is recognised by awards.
Awards are ‘evidence’ your ideas are of an excellent standard.
And that’s how you get another job, or a payrise.
Taking away awards means proactive work is pointless. It means you only have one shot a year (if you’re fucking lucky) with that rare brief that sails through and actually gets made. But they are very, very few and far between these days.
Sure, there are insecure people that need validation.
But at the end of the day, awards help creatives get better jobs and more money.
Take that system or ladder away – and why would the best talent stay?
That’s a reality that is true in any network agency.
But once you break out of it and go on your own or as part of a collective, the opportunities open up to make more money.
And how much more is truly up to how enterprising and creative you truly are.
Why depend on the opinion of bosses to reward you more when they are part to the system that is diluting your creative vision?
Of course it’s scary breaking out of the security of a regular paycheck.
But aren’t we all just 3 months away from the street anyway?
The hard work you mentioned is never recognized or valued in a network agency.
But they are the foundation of successful indie shops where clients actually pay top dollar for.
Think about it.