By Simon Hughes - It was an interesting coincidence that the first award category presented at the 2015 C&IT Awards was for the Automotive Event of the Year. This gave the amiable host Marcus Brigstocke the chance to work in another VWGate gag. “VW had booked a table for two for tonight – but then fifty of them turned up!” He did a sterling job by the way and obviously enjoyed working on an awards ceremony with which he had some real affinity, recognising I’m sure that he was in a room loaded with potential clients that deliver world class events and employ lots of creative talent.
The shortlist for the first award represented that talent from across the agency spectrum – won by Adding Value, it included Crown Business Communications, DRP Group and Jack Morton Worldwide. The automotive brands involved in the Awards included Peugeot, Citroen, Jaguar Land Rover, Hyundai, BMW and Mazda. For many years the automotive sector has provided fertile ground for business development in the events industry. The symbiotic relationship between brands such as Ford and agencies like Imagination helped establish a benchmark for creative innovation and excellence that has helped propel the UK events industry centre stage on a global basis.
Yet ask any seasoned event producer or client account director what it is like working with global brands in the automotive sector and I’m pretty certain you’ll hear the same reply – it is really tough. The demands made to stay ahead of the product innovation and engineering developments that al l the major car manufacturers invest in are often challenging. Frequently it requires creative solutions for the same audience with the same basic messaging time after time. The sheer volume of key stakeholders involved in the automotive supply chain creates demands of scale and complexity. Our industry has risen to that challenge many times and consistently delivered outstanding results, as recognised each year during the event industry awards season.
From major international trade shows to experiential test days for consumers, from new model launches to dealership training – the variety of creative solutions delivered by the UK event industry is quite remarkable. More importantly it covers the entire spectrum of activity – from event production, logistics, incentive travel, venues, design of retail environments and innovative deployment of technology, including building brand engagement through social media. So when a relatively small NGO in the USA (the International Council on Clean Transportation) uncovers something really alarming about one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world, we need to pay real attention to the consequences for our industry.
At the time of writing this, the full scale of this deliberate flouting of regulations designed to protect the environment is unclear. What is clear is that an army of lawyers are being deployed on both sides to deal with the toxic fallout from this failure of corporate accountability. The costs associated with cleaning up that fallout will run into billions and there will be many in the UK events industry wondering what the impact of those costs will be on the budgets and marketing plans for the automotive sector over the next few years. After all, we’ve been here before with the financial crisis, which saw the curtailment of huge swathes of business for the event industry. So just as all the indicators show a pickup in business confidence and increases in the share of marketing spend for live and experiential events, along comes VW and trashes its reputation for quality and reliability with some sneaky software fix.
It’s going to take a long time to fix this latest bout of corporate law-breaking and we can only hope that it is not something that extends widely beyond the VW brand. There is a broader question to answer too as we add this latest example of corporate malpractice to the many other scandals that have befallen us in recent times. From banking to energy, from football to doping in athletics, regulatory controls and accountability have moved up the agenda and make it incumbent on all of us involved in the supply side to analyse the risks and make sure that we spread our business development across a broad selection of sectors that avoids over dependence on any one particular industry. The need for improved business regulation to control the powerful vested interests wielded by international brands is not for us to deal with – but we may yet have to deal with the consequences as we pay the price for weak business regulation that enabled corporate cheating on such a cataclysmic scale.
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