The Marketing Agency Talk

Marketing and Advertising is all about creativity. If you boil it down to its essence, what marketing agencies and advertising agencies do, is sell their ideas and their creativity.  Stealing intellectual property, then, is like not only snatching the purse, but ripping the entire dress.

My friend Vivienne has a nice post about this over at her Versa Creations Marketing Blog. But do you think clients are the only ones who steal ideas? What about agency people?

They say that imitation is the truest form of flattery. Yeah, right. If you walked like Mr Bean, I am sure he would agree. But try BEING Mr Bean in a global TV Commercial without paying some moola.  But these are high profile and easily caught.

Here is an interesting one. We did a pitch once, the client sort of liked it. But there was some politicking going on and in the end, we were informed that our pitch did not quite make it, though it was “very nice”. Too bad. You win some and you lose some. However, when they launched the campaign (it was nation-wide so we saw it, we weren’t tracking), we realised that they have used at least two key elements from our campaigns! It was so clear we did not even stop to wonder, it was clearly our idea, used with different visuals and copy. What was then the problem for us to lay claim to it as our “intellectual property”? Simple. The agency was this huge international, super-famous, award-winning one. And we were just 2-people-small-time-full-service-marketing-agency. Guess who will be believed?

Such things happen. There are idiots everywhere. Unfortunately, they cross your paths; sometimes often. But if you are in a marketing agency, a large one; and you take a salary, will you understand the plight of the small guys? Will you even care?

Intellectual property theft in the marketing and advertising world is probably one of the hardest case to prove. Unless you so blatantly copy, it is so easy to change a few elements and its a whole new day - for you; it’s probably night for the other guy. If we can each play our part and maintain a high level of personal integrity, I am am sure we will all enjoy our work much, much more.