Claire Beale On Advertising

There's nothing adland likes more than a cracking awards bash. Free food, free booze, great ads, chance of a meaty pay rise if you walk the red carpet. They might not have much to do with shifting brands, but a good awards do is a diary highlight.

Last week's Aerials Awards was not a good awards do. The Aerials are radio advertising's big night out, celebrating the best of radio creativity. But standing in the pit at King's Cross La Scala - a decade older than most of the audience, rumbling for lack of canapés, clutching a plastic wine glass of suspicious red - I did wonder what it all said about the state of the medium.

The 2007 Aerials were the first for the new Radio Centre - a sort of trade body for commercial stations, designed to help the industry to drive audience levels and ad revenues. And the first for its like-him-loathe-him chief executive Andrew Harrison.

Now, the poor radio industry desperately needs every penny of ad revenue it can muster. Last year ad revenues were down by 5 per cent, with the usually more buoyant fourth quarter showing a worryingly sharp 10 per cent decline. And radio still takes a lowly 6.1 per cent share (about £600m) of all UK ad spend.

Before I go any further, I should say that the Aerials are held "in association" with Campaign, which means we write about the winners and I got to hack over to King's Cross, stand in a fleapit for an hour and hand out an award. But the principle of championing great creativity in radio is absolutely right.

And there were some great things about the event. Like the winners (Radioville taking the gold award). And the fact that plenty of young advertising creatives (so often left out of the other big awards shindigs) turned up. But to be honest, it all felt drab and down at heel compared with the other media's glitzy ra-ras, and the paucity of advertisers, creative chiefs and even commercial radio people all just seemed to underline radio's lack of status in the ad industry.

It's not hard to see why radio is a pauper cousin. Yes, radio is a very personal medium, with the power to be incredibly intrusive. Yes you can listen to it on your TV, in your car, on your PC, on your mobile; it is, perhaps, the most portable medium. And it's also arguably got less to worry about from the upstart internet - the two are perfectly complementary. And yes, the broadcasters have done well developing new types of commercial opportunity for advertisers, integrating ads and editorial in innovative ways.

But, but. Radio ads are extremely hard to do well. (You can't disguise a weak script with a bit of clever CGI.) And getting out a decent radio ad is unlikely to be a career-maker for creatives. So you won't find seasoned creatives scrapping over a radio brief: radio generally gets left to younger, less experienced creative teams. Which does nothing to raise creative standards in radio advertising. Which does nothing to raise the status of radio advertising among ad agencies. Which means radio awards are not coveted. Which means radio generally gets left to younger teams. And so the circle gets vicious.

It's not just a UK thing. I heard that one of adland's best creative directors recently got very excited about being invited to judge at this year's Cannes awards, even booking a family holiday around it. Then realised he was going to be sitting on the radio jury. Cue "something more important just came up". Oh the shame.

It's this sort of natural prejudice that the radio industry has to fight. On the evidence of last week's awards, it's not winning.

ANOTHER OF Another of adland's big awards are the D&ADs, held every May. Big in every sense. They're the grand finale to a two-week extravaganza celebrating the advertising and design industries under the banner of the D&AD Congress, which takes over London's Billingsgate for a fortnight of showcases and talks. In fact it's the polar opposite of the Aerials. D& AD (which stands for Design and Art Directors) is an educational charity set up to nurture and support creativity not only in the UK but also around the world. And it holds a pretty rarefied place in the ad industry: winning one of D&AD's yellow pencils is a seal of talent. Win one of the incredibly rare black ones and you're set for life in this business.

Anyway, last week the man masterminding all of this, Michael Hockney, suddenly quit his post as D&AD's chief executive. The timing is disastrous. D&AD's chairman, the venerable Anthony Simmonds-Gooding, reckons the organisation is in good enough shape to pull through. Ultimately he's probably right, but it's going to be a bloody few weeks as the backroom guys struggle to pull off one of adland's biggest, bravest and costliest events of the year.

Anyone who has ever tried to corral creatives to make a commitment to anything knows that it's like herding cats; they all love D&AD but reliability is infrequently their strong suit. Getting two entire industries of them (the design creatives and the advertising creatives) in line for Billingsgate is surely one of the toughest challenges in the business.

The next tough challenge will be to find a new chief exec with the energy, vision and vivacity required to do justice to the potential stature of D& AD. At a time when advertising is under relentless attack, D&AD should be joining the rest of the business in a vigorous defence of the industry and a confident proclamation of the value it adds to British business.

ANYONE WITH a passing interest in advertising, and anyone with a passing interest in corporate intrigue, will have been following the courtroom drama involving WPP's group chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorrell has accused two former WPP senior managers, the two Marcos, Benatti and Tinelli, of libel and the case has naturally caught the imagination of the media.

Coverage of the wrangle has variously labelled Sorrell as "the UK's best known advertising tycoon", a "global advertising magnate" , "one of the most powerful advertising executives in the world", "the £100m tycoon", "a giant in the world of advertising". You get the idea.

No doubt the trial is a painful personal process for Sorrell, and as much as his confederates will be feeling for him, plenty of Sorrell's sparring partners are taking amusement at the proceedings. But there's also no doubt that it has enshrined Sorrell as adland's celebrity boss, streets ahead of rivals such as Omnicom's John Wren or IPG's Michael Roth in the corporate status stakes. Every cloud ...

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW ASK.COM (FALLON)

Have you ever noticed how some ad breaks make you reach for your remote control? No, not because the ads are so bad you can bear to watch. But because the ad breaks are simply too loud and you have to turn the volume down.

I guess if you can't rely on a sparkling script and first-class direction to help your ad to stand out from the pack, then just being loud is one fall-back. But now BCAP (that's the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice) has launched an investigation into noisy ads. Fallon's new ad for ask.com has nothing to fear.

This is silent. And all the more compelling for that; you absolutely notice this ad because you suddenly wonder why your living room has gone quiet.

The big idea is advertising as guerrilla marketing. If an underground pressure group broke into a TV studio to make a renegade ad, it would look like this. The idea is that we should all break free from our internet search rut ("you are not an information droid") and try asking ask.com next time we're looking for something on the web.

As well as the TV silence, the big idea is to take the guerrilla theme into other areas of renegade marketing: graffiti, interactive outdoor advertising, T-shirts. It's an idea that is set to make a lot of noise.

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign'; claire.beale@haynet.com