Yes, it’s almost that time of year again. The BDA’s (Big Dumb Agencies) and their respective BDHC’s (Big dumb Holding Companies) will blow millions on entry fees for the more than 35 categories. When I won my first Lion, there where merely four, including cave wall painting. A ticket just to attend is now more than five grand, and don’t even ask me what Yacht rentals are… Obviously Hookers and Mimosas are extra.
When I was trousering the big bucks at Ogilvy, New York, back in the nineties, they employed a staff of four people to prepare and enter stuff to award shows all over the world. It’s probably a staff of ten by now. One year an agency in Timbuctoo, or somewhere weird, won a Gold Lion for a TV campaign aimed at local Umboola tribes to get them to put an iron bar in their cooking pots to avoid scurvy, aids, egomania and necrophilia. It later turned out that they had been doing that for the last hundred years. Plus, they didn’t have TV’s. Still, the agency used the campaign in their new business pitches. After all, a gold Lion is a Gold Lion. Even if its for an iron bar.
On a final note… I don’t have any picks for this years awards. Ninety percent of the spots I’ve seen feature cell phones, even when they are not selling cell phones… And ninety nine percent of the spots are shit. My entry is in the cave wall painting division.
George Parker is editor of Adscam.
