The ownership of intellectual property is an urgent problem facing agencies today, one that could change the face of our industry. As advertising professionals, our currency is ideas, and we're getting dumber about how we merchandise, value and protect them.
I believe the creator owns the IP rights, but a growing number of clients want us to sign ideas over to them at little or no cost. In some cases, they want us to do this before we're even chosen to pitch for their business.
That's like asking the groom to sign a pre-nuptial agreement before he's met the bride.
Recently, one of Canada's lead-ing cable and telephone comp-anies, Rogers Communications, approached more than 50 agencies with an $85 million assignment. Rogers, the country's second-largest ad spender, demanded the agencies unconditionally sign over ownership of all concepts, ideas and creative materials in advance of selection to the next stage, saying it had to protect itself in case future advertising resembled aspects of ideas submitted by a losing agency.
Surprisingly, almost every agency agreed, even when our industry voice, the Institute of Communications and Advertising, advised and lobbied against it.
Is what we do considered worthless? Or was the prize money just too much to walk away from? It's a vicious circle: clients are demanding more and many of us are dumbing down business practices to be competitive and win new accounts.
For more than a decade there's been an ongoing debate about "the future of advertising" and "the agency of the future". Today's entrepreneurial agencies (and there are far too few) know clients want real strategic insights and brilliant creative concepts, not tactical contact and lame ideas. Most are being paid well for those insights and ideas.
Like all businesses, our industry faces major challenges, but if we aren't brave and don't stop devaluing or selling our product for less than it's worth, we have no-one but ourselves to blame for how clients perceive and value our talents, as well as for how we're compensated for generating ideas.
Another front in the intellectual property war is playing out on the internet. Hoax ads are jamming clients and their ad agencies. No-one will forget the bogus "suicide bomber" Volkswagen Polo spot. The VW brand and DDB London's long-running "small but tough" concept were pirated and shot round the world on the internet, apparently without penalty.
The music and film industries call ideas "intellectual property" and take legal action if someone tries to appropriate them or download them for free. Ad agencies still give them away, and we wonder why we are having no fun, or are not being taken seriously as a profession.
- Frank Palmer is the chief executive and chairman of DDB Canada.
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