As I wade through the hand-wringing confessions and pious speeches from those shocked and appalled by the annual proliferation of “scam” ads, I see one trend more disturbing than the scams themselves: my fellow creatives, we have finally become our own worst enemies.

It shocks me that in article after article and blog after blog, creatives themselves seem unable to distinguish between, on one hand, a true scam and, on the other, a successful effort to get one of our uptight clients to loosen up a bit. It is the difference between a lie and a victory, and one which we should all take great care to understand.

We can probably all agree on the type of ad that is certainly a scam. If the client didn’t ask for it, or support it, or fund it, or have the slightest inkling that it even existed, it’s a scam. Duh. If you make up an ad and insert a brand after the fact without the brand’s knowledge or permission, you’re lying. You didn’t create an ad. You simply wrapped your book in someone else’s cover. Scam, scam, scam. Agreed.

However...when an agency team goes through the hard work of convincing a client to fund—or at least accept—a comfort zone-expanding experiment, and actually succeed in eliciting the client’s support in putting that ad out there for all the world to see, that’s a victory. It’s a small step toward the world which we all purport to seek, in which even big clients take chances with their advertising and initiate intelligent, amusing and compelling dialogue with their audiences. It’s what creatives say they want. So why do so many get so upset when it works?

Is it jealousy? Sour grapes? Is it that we all so often fail to get a client to buy something really good, that we’re resentful when others succeed? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that some creative people resent the success of other creative people. Ours is an art that has to work as a business, and artists can be temperamental. But it’s professional suicide on an industry-wide scale.

But I digress.

Let’s take a moment and give the outraged creatives the benefit of the doubt, and assume they have a solid case against the sort of experiments I’m talking about. Their arguments follow a few familiar strains:

1. “The client didn’t ask for it.” OK, so the client didn’t ask for it. The big business that’s very used to doing things a certain way didn’t wake up one morning and decide to do things differently. Well, of COURSE it didn’t. That’s why it hired us. We’re supposed to suggest different ways of doing things, not wait until the client happens across them. So if we come up with a new way to engage an audience that the client hadn’t considered, good for us. Sounds like we’re doing our job.

2. “The client only ran it once. In Buffalo. In the middle of the night.”

This is really a two-part argument. The first says that because the client didn’t run the spot worldwide, they didn’t really “mean” it. OK, so they stuck their toe in the water before they jumped in. Well, that’s what makes it an experiment. Instead of wearing her funky new dress to her own wedding, the client wore it to a dinner party first. That’s what people do when they’re trying out something new. They build their courage step-by-step. It’s called getting comfortable.

The second part of this particular argument is a financial one. It says if the client really supported the idea, they would have spent a lot more money on it. So since they didn’t spend a lot, the idea doesn’t count. But when did we begin to value art by the money invested in it? Do the Academy Awards have production budget or box office minimum that must be met for nomination? Do the Grammies only consider studio-produced Gold Records? Of course not. Even these billion dollar industries can step back once in a while, put down their P&L statements and agree that something is just plain good. They can reward the effort despite the cost or result.

One would hope, as purveyors of an art form, that we, too, can recognize the quality of a piece of work without asking what it cost to make, or for what it sold. At least we, of all people, should know that sometimes a piece of art doesn’t get what it deserves, but that doesn’t make it a scam. Van Gogh wasn’t a lesser artist for dying poor.

Every once in a while, I know, we do get it. I never heard anyone ask what the media budget was for Sony “Balls” or Dove “Evolution”. Few seemed to care whether “Grrr” ran on prime time, or for how long. And I know the Cadbury gorilla sold a lot of chocolate, but I hope that’s not what got creatives excited about it.

So sometimes we’re able to reward the work for its effect on the viewer—you know, it’s power as ART—and sometimes we’re not and cry, “Scam!” instead. Sometimes we can put our own egos aside and sometimes we can’t.

But as the artists in this business we need to do a lot better. When a great piece of work makes it through the excruciating birthing process and arrives in the world, no matter how briefly or quietly, we should applaud it without question. We should support the effort not just to create it, but also the greater effort to convince a client to give it a chance. We should not be the ones to ask how much was spent or how much was made but, rather, the ones to ask, “Who cares?”

As I said earlier, there are obvious scams. And they should be outed and slammed and shamed back into oblivion. An idea that couldn’t be sold may be great, but it’s not an ad. There are shows for unsold ads, but Cannes and the One Show and the Clios aren’t them. On that we can all agree.

However, when a great idea gets sold, however haltingly or cheaply or briefly, we need to be of one voice in its praise. Every one of those experiments makes our industry better, the quality of the work higher, and our clients more courageous. That’s what we want, remember?

We need to be a great art form before we can be an effective business. But if we can’t agree on that, and continue to shout down and punish every small victory and moment of client courage because it wasn’t quite businesslike enough, our industry will suffer irreparably. And we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.