By Prabhakar Mundkur
When I read about Sonal Dabral’s appointment on the board of the One Club of Creativity, I couldn’t help going to their website to see who the other board members were. It was no surprise that all the members were creative heads of agencies. Then I decided to visit the D&AD website. Again, no surprise. All the board members were creative directors.
Which raises an important question. Should award shows be run by a bunch of suits? Who have never written an ad in their entire life? After all, award shows celebrate creativity so it is natural that the people who run an award show must be creative.So, is relegating creative people for just ‘jury duty’ paying lip service to the creative community?
I asked one industry friend why suits might be running some award shows. He said that advertising clubs were a business, and they needed to be run by managers, not creative people. Now that doesn’t make any sense at all. Considering that most agencies in the country or the significant ones are being run by creative people rather than suits. But there could be another reason why creative people are not as prominent as they should be at local award shows. That they are not interested in doing anything beyond jury duty and would rather leave all rest of the dirty work for the suits to take care of. This however begs the question why they are willing to accept prominent positions on the boards of international awards, but not local awards. Are the local awards too infra dig? Or is there some other problem?
There could be a third reason why creative people are not given much prominence beyond jury duty in an award show. This is an old argument where suits and CMOs feel that they contribute equally to the creative process, so it is not out of place for them to be in charge of the awards. This argument is a bit contentious. CMOs should be heading the marketing award shows or at the most the Effies if they want to be still involved so deeply in advertising industry bodies, and suits should be heading the industry associations which are involved in the business of advertising. Why are they in prominent positions in the creative award shows? No clear and convincing answer emerges after examining all the alternative arguments.
At the end of the day, most award shows need event management skills more than anything else. No surprise then that the Cannes Lions is run by Ascential Events. Cannes is a unique business model where 42% of the revenue comes from delegate passes, 41% from award entries, 15% from partnership and digital, and 2% from hotel room booking commissions.A model worth emulating for any award show – where the revenues from award entries and delegate passes is almost equal.
Commonsense says that in the long term no award show can be really successful without roping in creative people as front runners of an award show.
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What? Yet another self-appointed Industry Body?
 
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If you can’t beat them, join them.If we didn’t have enough self-appointed industry bodies, whose members largely get self-elected year after year to their positions, we now have one more industry body called FEUD. (Forum for Ethical Use of Data). Formed by media professionals, one is not sure how they would detect the ethical or unethical use of data. After all, the most qualified technology professionals and data experts were not able to bring to our notice how FB and Cambridge Analytica were exploiting personal data. The use of data is a complex technological web that takes shrewd tech minds to figure out how data is being misused. If the Congressional hearings of Mark Zuckerberg are anything to go by, even he didn’t have answers to all the questions posed by the Congressional Committee.
Also, for an industry body to have teeth, it needs some recognition from the users and collectors of data, and some nod from a government body. Take the reported misuse of Aadhar data. It is a few sting operations from brave journalists and experts like Ed Snowden who brought to our notice how that data base is potentially being mis-used. Snowden has the unique distinction of both being a computer professional and an ex-CIA employee.
One would have rather seen a government body say headed by a person of Nandan Nilekani’s stature who understands the business of technology and data, or an industry group like NASSCOM to initiate a body for the ethical use of data. The other option could have been a self-regulatory body formed by companies who are sitting on tons of data, i.e. banks, telecom companies, Facebook and other social media companies and Google which dominates the Indian internet ecosystem. One can’t help wishing that a body like this could have been formed by more solid, powerful and competent authorities on the subject of data.
Lastly, to enforce ethical use of data, legislation is imperative. Currently India does not have any express legislation governing data protection or privacy.  The European Union’s GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ) which will become effective on May 25 will be one of the most wide-ranging and comprehensive pieces of legislation enacted to protect consumer data.Under GDPR, information such as customer IP addresses and even web cookies will be subject to the same strict security standards as physical addresses and social security numbers.
Unfortunately, in India the relevant laws on data protection are currently bundled under the Information Technology Act 2000.  There is no doubt the objective of FEUD is honorable, so this space is worth watching with interest.