Advertising Agencies and Intellectual Property

I've never understood who really benefits from agency reviews, where agencies are asked by a potential client to present them with spec creative work. And now Advertising Age reports that the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4 A's) has stood up and hopefully taken a committed stance against this drill. Agencies Defending Intellectual Property Rights in Reviews

In all my years of marketing, I've done spec work twice for agency reviews and still regret it. It felt...a little like pandering. I've also been in agency reviews, declined to do spec work, but wrote out in detail how we would approach the work and ended up winning the accounts (even though the other agencies in the review presented their spec work).

Developing ideas and then giving them away? Ideas are what creative agencies get paid to do! That's their product, the fruit of their labors  - ideas and the creative execution of those ideas. That's it.

Imagine 150 years ago - a wealthy industrialist asks four prospectors to bring their gold to him and he will look it over, keep all of the gold, and then tell one of the four prospectors that he likes their gold and will pay that, and only that, one prospector. The other three get a 'thanks for making the trip' and that's it.

Asking agencies to do spec work and then clients keeping the work regardless if the agency is hired is not fair to the agency. 

It's also not fair to the client. The agency is not in a position to do the proper, in-depth internal and external research to develop an insightful, unique, well thought-out, compelling selling message for the client. The client gets a taste of what the agency can bring, but not the deep diving required to do groundbreaking work.

So both client and agencies are shortchanged. But along with agencies being shortchanged, they often leave the review, and their ideas, with no change. 

illustration: ToOliver2

Comments

[Greg]

Amen!