Yes, I know the big topic the past week was that our beloved Patriots Guru of all things football was called out as a cheat. But hey, his fine was minor compared to what happened in Formula One Racing (http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory?id=3598167). But that’s not what I really want to talk about this week.

Over the years in this business we have all heard the comment there is no such thing as a new idea—just a reworked new idea. In any other industry it might be called plagiarism. But in our industry it’s called “creative.”

What I’m trying to say is this. There have been more times than I care to admit when we have been part of a presentation where the potential client wanted “spec” creative. (As a side point, I don’t like doing spec because you never have enough information to do a credible job.) So you do the spec and then you find out another agency won the pitch but you see your creative used six months later by the new agency! In other words the client liked your creative yet liked the other agency better for some unknown reason.

And it’s not always just spec creative. Sometimes it’s an idea for a promotion, the name of a product, a media direction—but whatever it is, if you came up with the idea and weren’t the one to execute it (or get paid for it!) it’s a stolen idea. We can label our creative as copyrighted but that gives you little or no protection today if someone slightly changes what you did to call it their own. And, as for promotions and budgets, it’s hard to put any copyright on those things.

I know it’s part of our business—but it’s still cheating.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 11:48 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.