Have you stopped beating your wife?
You can only answer Yes or No.
This is one of those damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t kind of situations.
The Ad Club Bombay refuses to name the agencies in the vote-for-yourself controversy and decides that it is up to each agency ‘involved’ to decide on whether or not to return metals.
This is patently unfair.
The Ad Club should have defined and announced the transgressions and the transgressors and withdrawn the metals awarded.
A decision like this might have made the committee unpopular or some individuals on the committee unpopular with all or some of the transgressors, but that is part of the responsibility that goes with being a senior office bearer.
The unnamed transgressors will find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If the transgressions are completely black and white, we might, indeed, see some metals being returned.
The problem is in those instances where the transgressions are in the grey zone, where an 'accused' genuinely believes he/she has not transgressed but has still been unnamed and shamed.
Because one knows of how the Ad Club functions in the context of the Abby’s, there is nothing that is rumoured and bandied about that one can be 100% certain of.
Which is why the Ad Club should have taken an unequivocal position on this, popularity be damned.
Now, as many of the comments suggest (to a point of greater cynicism than mine), this will limp along and be forgotten.
It won’t be buried, though. It will rear its ugly head the next year and the next.
