Originally Posted by
Mustonen
Beach House not throwing VW under the bus notwithstanding, that’s a broken accountability tree. The ad agency isn’t accountable to general public in any meaningful way; they sell their services to corporations. If VW isn’t held accountable they have little reason to hold the ad agency accountable.
The only way accountability flows in any rational or productive way is if general public holds VW accountable, and in turn VW holds the ad agency accountable. VW should be held wholly responsible for the conduct of their agents, in a court of law and in the court of public opinion. If the ad agency is a large corporation and corporate lawyers are doing all the corporate lawyer things a part of the contract should include indemnification for silly shitty conduct; likely limited to something like contract value unless they went way outside the lines in grossly negligent ways, and probably not in a way that meaningfully protects them from a PR mess. It’s a pleasant fiction that the ad agency can or should firewall VW from exposure here, but a fiction is all it should be.