Efficiency at any price

I have never heard this said in advertising, I mean, "we need to have an efficient campaign at any cost and in doing that we shall not think for a second of how we do what we do".
This is probably going to be my only polemical post of the blog EVER but I cannot help it especially since I seem to have angered a dear friend and being the person I am...I want to anger him completely.

This is the poster produced for the school of creatives part of the Art Director's Club. It features in a well recognizable "manele" concert [low class oriental type of music much berated by mainstream and elite] poster layout, the country's top 12 creative directors.
One of them, annoyed by comments of the kind I am about to make, has placed an explanation of the thinking behind this here and, as always he makes sense because, true, VIP endorsements sells and telling people that they will get to hang out with the coolest of the advertising world probably works double.

I only wonder if recruiting those that come to school to hang out with the cool ones is what they should have been aiming for. If it was volume they were going for, they surely got it with this. If it was buzz, yeah, it did that too because people went "har har, these crazy creatives...". I think, however, that when you are trying to teach people to become creatives who will want to go beyond the easy, face value, Romanian slice of life humor and develop a market of truly valuable designwork and copywork, we should raise the bar in recruitment as well. This is supposed to be the Art Director's Club - if only for that, a more rewarding execution would have been in order. This layout also bears the question what kind of place is the ADC going to be?

I know we are looking for efficiency, but not at the expense of the brand. Even as far as efficiency goes, I still think it's so much easier to pick the pearls from a bucket of pebbles than from a wagon of mud :)