Anant’s blog: Ad Club, we need a statement

Earlier in the week, we broke a story saying four agencies would lose some metals, thanks to jurors belonging to particular agencies voting for their own entries.

The story was picked up by other trade websites, each with embellishments. Some correct, some incorrect, but the stories stayed largely in the same zone.

This morning, The Economic Times does a story on the issue. They have named four agencies – one of which is wrong.

That's a serious disservice to the agency, without question.

They have named some of the jurors involved in the ‘vote-for-yourself scam’ – but not all.

That’s patently unfair.

To the best of my understanding only 15 of the invalid votes affected metals.

As I write this, ‘Pops’ KV Sridhar posted and tweeted on the ‘innocence’ of people like him who made ‘human’ errors. It transpires that they transcended humanness in subsequent rounds and abstained. Bobby Pawar, who I spoke to earlier this morning, also speaks of human error.

To quote him, "Let me clarify what I did. 81 times forgot to put the letter ‘A’, which means I abstain, against our entries. I did NOT vote for them, I left those entries blank, mistakenly thinking that it meant I abstain. My blank vote actually worked against Mudra’s entries, because a tick means you are voting for an entry and a blank is interpreted as you are voting against it. So my error in thinking that a blank is equal to an abstain vote and not a negative vote probably ended up costing us a few more shortlists, because to repeat myself, I was actually voting against our own work."

There are Bobby's human errors which are different from Pops' human errors?

I’m sorry, Pops, this doesn’t hold water. There cannot be a defence that you killed innocently while someone else killed with malicious intent. The Ad Club, whom you suggest is being influenced by Mudra, is made up of people like you and your peers, and the Abbys executive committee is the only body that can decide on all the transgressors – and they will not be able to differentiate between the ‘human’ transgressions and the ‘malicious’ ones. All transgressors, for good or for bad, are in the same boat.

In addition to this vexatious issue, there has been the issue of plagiarism which has reared its ugly head. Some entries, I understand, are blatant lifts.

This is getting messier and messier.

The silence from the Ad Club is not helping matters.

They need to make a statement on what exactly is the state of affairs. They need to announce how many agencies are in the dock, how many metals are affected by the invalid voting and when they will meet to decide on what will be done.

Colvyn Harris dismissed the reports in the trade media as speculation.

There will be a lot more as long as there is silence.