Naïveté.

Dumbly.
Stupidly.
Naively
            I had thought that post-Omnicom/IPG subsumation (I can't call it a merger) that people would wise up to mercenary yuck of the ad industry. 

When whole agencies--the same year they've won 'Cannes Agency of the Year'--are obliterated with the stroke of a $1200 Mont Blanc pen, I thought maybe people would notice. 

Maybe they'd be repelled by the stink..

When a holding company wins 'Network of the Year,' as it fires half its staff, loses half its clients and sees its market cap drop by 80-percent, 

I thought maybe people would smell the rot.

Instead, by way of example, people turn out in droves to see 'Gilligan's Island Meets the Love Boat,' because the studio spent $170 million promoting it and another $25 million making sure it won a slew of academy awards. So, because it's won awards people flock to see it, post that it's great and gush about it. It must be. It's award-winning.

Rather than question the value of the phonus-balonus concoctions of things like the Fifa Peace Prize, we as an industry go along with it because something shiny is involved and maybe some graft will spill our way.

In other words, I'm sickened, naively and once again, by how many in what was once our industry are posting their pictures on social-media-data-theft sites announcing that they've been named a judge of this show or that for this award or that.

Rather than question, we join in.

If you won a gold as "fastest" but in reality you're a quadriplegic you'd think someone somewhere would say, 'hey, these awards have no credibility and make no sense.' You'd think there would be yaps if not howls of protest.

It reminds me of someone naming their kid Senator. So they'd always be called "Senator Ratzkywatzky." Calling something something doesn't make something something.

Just as the radical right tearing apart the shreds of amerrykaka insist there is trump-derangement-syndrome, a disdain for the man regardless of reality, our industry is afflicted by award-aggrandizement-syndrome. We cherish awards even though there is no linkage between merit and worth and what's won.

Sure the work sucked. 
Sure it never really ran outside of LinkedIn.
Sure it had no material effect on a client's business.
Sure the agency that did it fired everyone.
Sure the ostensible client is selling its parts and has been 'downgraded' by financial institutions.
Sure they're bleeding marketshare and shelf-space.
It won an award.

If you win awards because you do good work, fine.
If you win awards because you've gamed the system, you have to question the very veracity of the system.

It's unfortunate, but for years I've been barking in this space about how our industry now replicates the corruption seen in the rest of the world. 

We award people and work because certain people have paid for those awards. No one outside our dying industry care about the awards we are spending literal millions on. They become our end all and be all as all is ending. 

We have lost our judgment.
And replaced it with award-ment.

You don't have to read me.
You don't have to agree with me.
You certainly don't have to like me.

But empirically, there's no universe in the world where this makes sense. Except one conceived by Orwell. Where Losing is Winning. And Fake is Real. And Success is Failure. And Decay Fortifies.