Roger Makak Monkeys with Campaign Brief Asia’s Creative Rankings

Campaign Brief Asia, the regional creative advertising magazine, unleashed a monster with its Creative Rankings. Asia’s creatives, no matter if they claim otherwise, crave for proof of their creative prowess (or lack thereof) and to see where they stand among “Who’s Hot! Who’s Not!”  Creative directors, art directors, copywriters drooled over the Campaign Brief Asia’s 10th annual Creative Ranking issue, released in February 2008.

The Creative Rankings masturbate creative egos. But it is also a genuine and statistical picture of how each creative individual (CDs, AD and copywriter) and each agency fares in major international and  regional award shows within a two-year period.

There seems to be a genuine need for these rankings. Agencies and creatives use it for self-reflection, for bragging rights (e.g., “the No. 1 Creative in Campaign Brief’s Ranking”) for headhunting and for fostering well-intoned competition. Moreover, while The Gunn Report covers the world, Campaign Brief Asia’s Creative Rankings is focused on Asia. Well done, Campaign Brief Asia!

There is a world out there that says it does not care about awards or rankings, but interestingly, their network bosses evaluate majority of creative directors against their performance in creative awards.

These popular rankings are laboriously put together by Campaign Brief Asia’s editor, well-loved and good-natured, Kim Shaw. The Creative Rankings count wins at Cannes, The One Show, Clio, ADFEST, Asian Advertising Awards (Spikes), AWARD Awards (Australia) and The Work (a compilation of ads by published by Campaign Brief Asia). If you win in any of these shows, you will get a name check in the rankings, starting from No. 1 to 1,155.

Given the importance of the Creative Rankings, the prevailing question is “WHO IS ROGER MAKAK?”

According to the latest charts, he is the No.1 creative in Asia (moving up from 19th last year)! Roger even gained kingship in THE WORK 07’s Honour Board and was named Creative of the Year.

Based on the credits on his ads, he is a copywriter in Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore, and from his photo in the publication, he looks to be a young man with a monkey on his shoulder. (By the way, Makak, is an Indonesian name, and it means “monkey”!)

Because of this mysterious Roger Makak, last year’s No. 1 creative, Thirasak Thanapatanakul of Creative Juice\G1 Thailand, slid to the No. 2 slot.

No one outside of Saatchi cared to       ask who Roger Makak was until he topped the rankings.

Campaign Brief Asia’s Kim Shaw         never met Roger Makak, despite covering the Asian creative scene for ten years.             He visited the Saatchi Singapore office recently to meet the man but was told     “he is on holiday.”

But someone inside Saatchi Singapore told adobo, Roger Makak was created four years ago and is actually the agency’s monkey mascot! And not even a live animal, but a stuff toy in the Singapore office.

The slow and painful reveal finally happened at ADFEST in Pattaya, when someone told Kim Shaw of the possibility that his No. 1 man was a stuffed baboon.

Did Andy Greenaway, regional executive creative director of Saatchi Asia and Singapore intend to discredit and compromise Campaign Brief Asia’s precious Creative Rankings? Was it a game for him, to see if a fictional homo sapien could top the rankings, just for laughs? Well, whether it was planned or not, Saatchi’s monkey is King Kong of the charts!

When confronted in Pattaya, Andy Greenaway denied it and even told adobo, “You can email him. He has an email address.”

Kim wished he were in on the joke. His disgruntled publishers wrote a complaint to the Saatchi bosses, who prevailed on Andy to come clean with this statement:

“Let me put the record straight once and for all. This started off as an internal thing and then somewhat overtook us. It wasn’t part of a grand scheme to undermine Campaign Brief and its rankings. The campaign wasn’t designed, it was stumbled upon. Which is why we haven’t managed it as well as we could have—and I’m sorry for that.”

Andy Greenaway said that HE is Roger Makak! “So to reassure you [Kim], Roger Makak is based on a real person: me.”

If Roger Makak was not a real person, this would mean that Creative Juice\G1 Bangkok’s Thirasak Tanapatanakul, who came second in the Creative Rankings, was cheated out of the No. 1 spot.

But Andy Greenaway is also named and ranked in the 210th spot in the Creative Rankings. If Andy and Roger are one and the same, can a person appear twice in the same ranking? That             is for Kim Shaw to answer.

Here is Andy’s story.

“I have been heavily involved with the Singapore office since I joined. As you know, the agency had slipped to something like 12 in the Creative Rankings, and it was a priority for me to get it back up to a respectable position. As such, I have been involved in every award-winning campaign in that office in some way or other for the last three years. As you probably know, I am not one to steal the limelight from any team that produces a campaign. I see myself and my job as that of a mentor, facilitator and empowerer to the people that work for me. However, there has been a tradition in Saatchi that anyone that has been involved in a campaign, no matter how large or small, gets a credit. We call it ‘One team, one dream.’

“At the beginning, when the team put my name down on campaigns,                  I instructed them to take it off.   Their way of getting around the issue (something they felt passiontely about) was to create a pseudonym for me. My nickname in the Bangkok office is King Kong, hence the monkey connotations that exist in the name Roger Makak.”

Campaign Brief Asia said they were relieved to hear that  Roger Makak is a real person in Andy Greenaway.  But Thirasak is probably skeptical, and he is not alone.

Since then, Roger Makak, as the mascot, has been seen and photographed hard at work in the Saatchi office. An amusing sight!

Moreover, he will appear yet again in a forthcoming recruitment campaign by Saatchi Singapore.

“This campaign might even win a Titanium!” Andy said half-jokingly.

Andy, adobo believes, deserves a spanking for the spoiling the rankings.