• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 1, 2013

Reactions to JWT India’s “vile” faux ads for the Ford Figo -– entered by a creative team looking to garner an “attaboy” from the Ads of the World website’s monthly awards competition –- continue to reverberate this morning, including an AdAge package with a lede story by Laurel Wentz that asks the provocative question: “Is the Ad-Awards Race Crushing the Client?”

Wentz writes that marketers face a minefield “when their ad agencies put their zeal for creative awards ahead of the brand’s best interests and indulge in 'scam ads' that don’t go through the normal approval process." 

“Clients don’t know that this is happening,” Nancy Hill, president-CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, tells Wentz. “Creatives have done this for so many years on their own but with it getting out in public, this has got to be a wake-up call. Creative directors have to take the responsibility … and ask ‘WWCT: What would the client think?’”

In the event that you missed the initial reports, which broke last week, “the most controversial of the three ads featured a caricature of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose political career has been rocked by sex scandals,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Santanu Choudhury and Jeff Bennett reported. “It showed Mr. Berlusconi grinning from the driver’s seat, flashing a victory sign, with three scantily clad women bound and gagged in the car’s trunk.” 

The Figo’s tagline is “Leave your worries behind with Figo’s extra-large boot,” referring to its storage capacity.

A young creative team posted the print execution to the Ads of the World website without approval, as Business Insider reported, leading to summary firings and rapid apologies. Then it turned out that the agency had also entered the ads in the Goafest ad festival. Among the recently departed: Bobby Pawar, chief creative officer and managing partner at JWT India, and Vijay Simha Vellanki, the creative director at Blue Hive, a WPP unit dedicated to managing the Ford business. 

Another ad showed Paris Hilton in the front seat with the Kardashian sisters including a bikini-clad Kim, tied up in the trunk. Would it surprise you to learn that they are considering legal action? “The ‘leave your worries behind’ Ford ads are disgusting, vile and offensive to all women,” the family’s lawyer said and Brandon Seiler reported on Examiner.com. “It is unacceptable that Ford would align itself with an ad agency that would so carelessly release these ads.” 

The third ad shows Formula 1 racer Michael Schumacher abducting three of his rival drivers. For some reason, it did not seem to get as much play in the social or mainstream media as the other two ads.

“Even though the ad never ran in paid media, once something’s on the internet, the damage has been done,” Business Insider’s Laura Stampler pointed out, at a time that India has been “rocked by several gang rapes, sparking women’s rights protests.” 

Ford CMO Jim Farley apologized at the beginning of a keynote at the New York Auto Show last week, saying: “It was totally inappropriate, it is not acceptable and swift action has been taken.” 

The Indian ad industry has been “shaken” by the departure of Pawar in particular, Neha Thirani Bagri reports in the New York Times’ “India Ink” blog this morning, as he is “one of the finest and most respected figures in the industry,” as one industry source says. He is seen as “taking the fall” for junior staffers.

“As a leader, this incident happened on my watch,” Pawar told The Hindu. “I have to take moral responsibility for it.”

But on a larger scale, “the incident has raised questions about ethics in Indian advertising, an industry that has grown by as much as 11.4% each year between between 2006 and 2010," Thirani Bagri writes. 

On the other hand, Vishal Mehra, a digital strategist at Bite’s New Delhi office, thinks the whole incident has been overblown. Writing in Ad Age, he surmises: “No one really blamed Ford for this mess, and no one ever will. We all talk about brands having a ‘human side’ and how consumers appreciate it, but when the time came to depict exactly that, the easy way out was taken.”

Nonetheless, Age’s Rupal Parekh and Natalie Zmuda offer “Four Steps To Protect Your Brand From Scam Ads,” concluding with “If you have a policy that details consequences for the creation and distribution of scam ads, review it. And if you don’t have one, create one soon.”