For this year's Lions Festival, all entries must be signed by a senior member of the agency's staff, and the rules of the competition state that ads must have client permission and that all entries must be designed for transmission.
It is further cracking down on the problem of scam ads -- ads that have never actually run for the client -- by refusing to process entries thay have not be signed by a senior member of agency staff.
The issue of scam advertising has caused passions to run high in the advertising industry in the past, with Ogilvy & Mather threatening to boycott last year's Cannes festival over the issue. The issue was resolved after the agency held extensive conversations with the president of last year's jury, Jeff Goodby of Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco.
In recent years, entering scam advertising into competition has had some serious consequences for the creatives involved.
In the UK, Paul Belford and Nigel Roberts have been permanently banned from ever sitting on the jury of the awards scheme run by 北京赛车pk10, sister magazine to Brand Republic, and are midway through a three-year ban on them entering creative work.
This is after an ad for the Samaritans, entered in to the 北京赛车pk10 Press Awards, was revealed to never have run in the execution that was entered. Belford and Roberts worked for Ogilvy & Mather at the time the ad was entered, but shifted to Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO while the scandal was breaking.
Brazil has been at the centre of several scam ad scandals, having two Lions withdrawn after last year's award ceremony. The ads at the centre of the controversy were three print ads for Medecins Sans Frontieres, created by Giovanni FCB; and a poster for Johnson & Johnson's KY Jelly, created by DPZ.
The problem is, even with the clampdown on approval for Cannes entries, judges are often reliant on clients to point out that ads are not part of real campaigns. This was how both Giovanni FCB and DPZ were caught out last year, with Medecins Sans Frontieres saying that the ad was expressly forbidden from being entered in competition, with its controversial image of an injured man with a Palestinian flag wrapped around his wound.
In the case of the KY Jelly ad, Johnson & Johnson pointed out that DPZ had not worked for the company for three years.
Many in the industry believe that making senior creatives sign off all entries will help crack down on scam ads, because it will force them to make a commitment to saying it is legitimate. Also, the public humiliation of previous exposes is likely to lessen the number of scam entries.
However, this will not stop the problem of what one creative, Russell Ramsey from Bartle Bogle Hegarty, describes as "chip shop ads" -- ads for small business, which are created when an agency has a good idea for a brand and convinces a business to run it in some small capacity.
He says: "It's hard if you've been working on a 拢30m global campaign and all of the constraints that involves, only to be beaten by something like a one-off ad for a gym with 25 members."
Dave Droga, creative director for Publicis Worldwide, thinks that while judging each piece of work on its merits, it should also take into account the "degree of difficulty" of the assignment.
Cannes rules state that the ad must be created within the boundaries of a normal paying relationship, except in the case of the not-for-profit sector. But there is still room for this rule to be abused. One can only hope that fear of humiliation if publicly exposed, if not integrity, can stop this from being a major problem at this year's festival.
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