Dear Ad Agencies, You Can't Pass Anything & Everything Off as Creativity

The answer is in the advertising body recommending a fine on both the agency and the creative team.

Where does creativity begin – and where does your nose end? As a society, we are now expected to have much, too much tolerance, for what is often misbranded as 'creativity.'

What agencies (and by extension corporates) these days tend not to understand is that very often, they lead by example. They become lodestars for behaviour patterns of the future. Consider how successfully agencies with 'creative advertising' have – time and again, over the eons – bent consumer preferences and created consumer needs. This is what needs to be recognised, even as we tend to curb the recent exuberant excesses of creativity.

The fact is that the two ads currently in question were pretty bad in terms of creative content. They seemed to pitch a kind of obnoxious – and rather obvious line – that is best described as juvenile. In fact, it would be appropriate to call them triggered by a kind of juvenile delinquency.