Dear Ad Agencies, You Can't Pass Anything & Everything Off as Creativity

The answer is in the advertising body recommending a fine on both the agency and the creative team.

What agencies (and by extension corporates) these days tend not to understand is that very often, they lead by example. They become lodestars for behaviour patterns of the future.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

Where does creativity begin – and where does your nose end? As a society, we are now expected to have much, too much tolerance, for what is often misbranded as 'creativity.'

What agencies (and by extension corporates) these days tend not to understand is that very often, they lead by example. They become lodestars for behaviour patterns of the future. Consider how successfully agencies with 'creative advertising' have – time and again, over the eons – bent consumer preferences and created consumer needs. This is what needs to be recognised, even as we tend to curb the recent exuberant excesses of creativity.

The fact is that the two ads currently in question were pretty bad in terms of creative content. They seemed to pitch a kind of obnoxious – and rather obvious line – that is best described as juvenile. In fact, it would be appropriate to call them triggered by a kind of juvenile delinquency.

There's No Escaping 'Agency Responsibility'

There is no doubt that a lot of this happens because of poor or aggressive client briefing. But there is no escaping what I would call 'agency responsibility.'

The problem has less to do with the briefing, and more with poor creativity. And I mean poor, both from a sensitivity point of view, and a sheer market context point of view.

The brand (you will notice that I'm deliberately not naming it to avoid giving it any more oxygen) has since issued a "statement of clarification," apologised, and "voluntarily" recalled the advertisements. Curiously, it still insists that the ads were aired "only after due & mandatory approvals." Whatever do they mean? More juvenile attempts at obfuscation?

Yet, it already is too little, too late. It is unlikely that except in pockets where any kind of gender sensitivity – or awareness about #MeToo – hasn't penetrated, there may be vestiges of this kind of behaviour, being trigger-worthy, and unbothered about such niceties.

Should an ad appeal to the lowest common denominator of customers? Should an ad be making it aspirational, that this is the kind of heinous behaviour that can be tolerated, whether it is in a home, which was the setting of the first ugly one, or in a supermarket, which was the setting for the second one?

Clearly, the space in which insult and injury to women can happen is being expanded as a result of this kind of poor creative thinking.

Advertising Body Needs To Bite the Bullet

As somebody who has sat on the board of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) for a couple of terms, I think the answer is not in claiming toothlessness.

The answer is in the ASCI now recommending a fine on the creative team and the agency. The fine should be so substantial that the agency will have to either lose its entire profit for a couple of years or have to recoup the money from the client who will hopefully sack them anyway after such a controversy has erupted.

The idea is that when signal punishment is meted out by the ASCI to an agency, and a proper external and empowered agency is earmarked to collect that fine (preferably a government agency like a Consumer Protection Authority of some kind), then things will begin to hurt.

And only when they are really, deeply hurt, will things begin to improve.

Only a penal fine will make everybody recognise that there's a real and imminent threat to their bottom lines. That, if nothing else, will startle them into paying more attention. Only when that happens can we expect to see real change.

The ASCI will, in the meantime, patiently continue to hold workshops with creative heads of agencies, sensitise them, and make them listen to the pious guidelines that the body trots out from time to time.

Unfortunately, these don't have traction with agency heads or any active attention from creative heads. That is simply the way this world is structured.

Does this require a change in the way the ASCI is structured? Perhaps, yes? But it is time that the ASCI bit that bullet and decided to go further than its current role now.

If self-regulation is seen to fail, then the notion of self-regulation itself may be questioned. If self-regulation is found to be too weak, then it will be necessary for the government to step in and play a role, which is something the industry desperately wants, and indeed, needs to avoid.

A Call for Enhanced Creativity

No one is suggesting censoring here. No one is suggesting any curbs on creativity. In fact, this is a call for enhanced creativity – to work around the obvious and to work within the boundaries. That is the secret of great marketing and of communications, an area where I spent a lot of time on.

Otherwise, yet another area where I spend time on, which is crisis management, will become the more essential norm for clients and companies who use agencies that don't respect the nuances and the basic tenets of societal functioning. This is what needs to be changed, and this change needs to happen today.

Sure, companies will still try and fish in troubled waters. Sure, there will be client organisations who believe that what is acceptable to an old boys' network is acceptable to the rest of the world. Many of them have not woken up and smelt the cordite.

This is real, this is the smell of scalded skin. The kind of excesses on sexuality and cultural mores have more than once come into close contact with what is thereafter branded as creativity.

No one is suggesting that everything needs to be held sacred or placed on a pedestal or that humour is unacceptable.

But in a society, which is currently scarred by the kind of horrific rape that we have just witnessed in Hyderabad, this is the time to put this excessively ugly, and so-called creativity business, into reverse gear. The time is now, the need is high, and anyone who doesn't listen to the grinding of gears changing is likely to be burnt to a cinder.

(Dilip Cherian, Founder of Perfect Relations, has been a board member of the Advertising Standards Council of India. He is on Twitter and Instagram at @dilipthecherian. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)