Mike Daube is professor of health policy at Curtin University in Australia.
He owns a rescue dog, a female Staffordshire terrier, named Ollie.
Mike was irritated by the number of emails he kept getting from medical journals every day.
Journals offering to review and publish medical papers, for a fee.
This allows young students and doctors to say they’ve had their work reviewed by their peers, and published.
They think it will give them credibility.
But Mike Daube knew it was a scam, just a way to rip off gullible people.
And he set out to prove it.
He sent in an application to seven of these journals for a role as a paid reviewer.
He applied in his dog’s name: Dr Olivia Doll.
He said she was a graduate of Subiaco College of Veterinary Science.
They asked for her special area of study.
Mike knew Ollie liked to have her tummy rubbed, so he wrote: "The benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines".
Ollie was accepted at all seven publications.
She was even offered an associate editor’s role at the Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine.
Even though a couple of clicks on a laptop could have shown that Dr Olivia Doll and her college didn’t exist.
But that didn’t matter to these publications.
All they wanted was the thousands of dollars they make from printing reviews of medical papers.
As Mike Daube says, they depend on the gullibility of those involved.
The criteria for good work is reversed: a paper isn’t published because it’s good, it’s considered good because it’s published.
Surely that’s similar to advertising awards.
Creative directors have lost the ability to judge good work.
So they need award schemes to tell them if it’s good or not.
It doesn’t win an award because it’s good work, it’s only good work if it won an award.
Which is why young people must get an award, no matter how.
Even if it’s a scam ad that never ran.
In fact there’s now even an award scheme for ads that never ran.
That’s like an awards scheme for boats that can’t float, or planes that can’t fly, or guns that can’t shoot.
Kind of makes you wonder what the purpose is.
But it’s like primary school where all the children must have prizes so that no one feels left out.
Surely when awards become that pathetic they are meaningless.
The work is irrelevant: the award is everything.
Goodhart’s law should be pinned up in our offices:
"When a measurement becomes a target it ceases to be a good measurement."
Dave Trott is the author of Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three.