A series of television spots for Vancouver pet supply store Canine Equipment, featuring an elderly man and his homicidal dog, caused quite a stir at last year’s Lotus Awards. But it wasn’t the sight of splattering blood that got everyone all steamed up. It was the fact that most people had never seen the ads before.
The spots – in which the dog variously electrocutes and mutilates his master – did run in the Vancouver market, but in such low weights as to be virtually undetectable. For many in the agency community, the Canine Equipment ‘bad dog’ campaign was yet another example of work being done for what are pejoratively called ‘pseudo-clients.’
Pseudo-clients are those with little or no marketing budget and who have little or no say in the creative direction of the campaign. The agencies that are behind such controversial and low-weight campaigns, many in the industry charge, are less interested in selling the client’s product or building brand awareness than they are in qualifying to win an advertising award.
The issue has caused so much concern that members of the Lotus Award committee are planning to meet this month to discuss whether they should tighten the entry guidelines to prevent such work being submitted.
‘There has been some concern expressed about whether the inclusion of this kind of work takes away from the credibility of the show,’ says Lotus Award chairman Richard Fisher.
It’s an issue with which organizers of awards shows across Canada are grappling. Last year’s Advertising & Design Club Awards book included a denunciation of so-called pseudo-clients by Jamie Way, ADC chairman and creative director of TBWA Chiat/Day. ‘It seems increasingly that only small and trivial accounts are privy to our talents and passions,’ he said at the time. ‘At the end of the day, does an award-winning ad for a tattoo parlour really affect Canada’s reputation and presence in the world (advertising) scene?’
For many in the creative community, work for pseudo-clients is seen as a legitimate way to interest larger clients in the creative possibilities of advertising as well as to promote the creative muscle of the agency. Others, however, see it as merely a convenient way to grab awards.
‘Our clients put us in a box,’ says Alvin Wasserman, president of Vancouver-based Wasserman & Partners Advertising, which has a policy of not courting so-called pseudo-clients. ‘The box includes (the client’s) budget, their positioning, and the demands of the market. The real art of advertising is creating compelling and effective work that breaks out of that box while still respecting the client’s limitations.’
But work for pseudo-clients, or ‘Robin Hood clients’ as Rethink’s Chris Staples prefers to call them, can help to raise the creative bar for every client in an ad agency’s stable. Staples points to his former employer Palmer Jarvis DDB’s award-winning and edgy work for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada as an example.
‘A lot of the McDonald’s advertising elsewhere is boring, but by seeing the work we were doing for smaller ‘Robin Hood’ clients, McDonald’s got a lot more comfortable with a different kind of ad,’ he says.
While agencies should always be looking for new and unusual ways to help their clients move away from the pack, it’s even more important to do so for small clients who have little or no media budget, Staples says. A campaign for the tiny Kelowna, B.C.-based Tree Brewing Co. featuring a search for the ‘G-spot’ did not even run after it was banned by the B.C. Liquor Control Board, but Staples estimates the campaign received about $200,000 worth of media coverage.
Drafting rules that eliminate pseudo or Robin Hood work from award shows will be difficult, if not impossible, without punishing small clients who cannot afford large media buys, says Fisher.
For Phil Brown, the creator of the Canine Equipment ‘bad dog’ spots, the grumbling is merely a matter of sour grapes.
‘I don’t see the problem,’ he says. ‘We did work for a real client, they do sell pet supplies and the commercials ran.’
