Creative Award in Slovakia Losing Credibility

March 2001 was a bad month for creativity in Slovakia. The national creative award Zlaty klinec (Golden Nail) was a big disappointment for many creatives and agency executives. The reason: too many ads awarded that noone would seriously call creative.

Creativity is a matter of taste, but it was really suspicious that many of the questioned awarded ads were the work of one agency. And some members of the by Slovakia's ADC chosen jury had also comments to the votes. And when you took a closer look on the votes of jury, you could really see that one member, Raffo Tatarko (creative director of Wiktor/Leo Burnett) had given too many points to his agency work and only few to the others.

ADC's reaction came quickly and Mr. Tatarko had been suspended. But to the advertising people that's not enough. They call for better rules that will restrain jury members from favoring their home agencies.

One way out of this situation could be in getting more foreign jury members. The other one is in changing the voting procedures (for example not considering the highest and lowest votes like in figure skating). At present time neither ADC, nor the organizer AAA announced further actions.

And a big deal of Zlaty klinec's credibility got lost.