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Chief
Wharton submitted!!! So anxious
Additional Posts in Advertising
how many of you get high before/during work?
🙋🏻♂️
What’s the best agency to work at?
give this man a raise.
What health/pharma agencies are in SF?
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Different people come up with the same idea. Let it go. I’d had a mentor tell me, “you don’t have to be good, you just have to be first.”
If someone steals your clever new way to sell fries just roll with it. The world will continue to turn. Ideas on their own don’t mean much unless you’re curing cancer.
What I’m saying is ideas are cheap. And in this business they have the half life of a fire fly. We think because we get fancy awards because we geolocated a mouldy whopper our ideas have incredible value, but unless your idea is directly responsible for generating millions of dollars in revenue for a business, it’s just an idea, one of a million generated every day, every minute. Move on to the next one, and the next one. Your financial security will be dependent on how many and how consistently you come up with ideas over 2-3 decades, not on one or even 100.
This is rule 101. don’t pitch ideas unless there’s a deal in place.
plagiarizing is wrong. But hey, if they truly want to lift old work that I already made three years ago? I mean, I guess be my guest.
I’m suspicious that some spec work I did got lifted by an agency I interviewed with. Just way too specific an idea. And the timing is very suspect.
Once I told a prospective agency that I’m happy to do a spec project, but not in a category they had an existing client. They flipped out, because they were “insulted”. Bullet dodged.
What a group of gold diggers.
Rising Star
No hasn’t happened to me
Happens all the time
I have been interviewing for a VP role for a month now and last week the company head posted a new product launch video which is identical to a spec campaign on my portfolio. I now know the CCO is famous for stealing work. S/he is only a few months in at the company. Do I present this to HR?
When you aren’t working at W+K, you are more likely to need to show work that was scrapped by timid clients.
When I worked in Fashion Design and graphics that was common- it really sucks when you are original and rather than hiring talent they just rip you off.
Well sort of.
I was a young copywriting intern/junior copywriter from overseas who wanted to share some ideas with the CCO of an agency I respected and eventually ended up in.
Went on vacation, wanted the house tour and then the pitch floor. I presented a very simple, beautiful flip on a word in Spanish for a client they had. The CCO tore the ideas apart, gracefully. Exposure to gain, nothing to lose.
(Maybe) a year after that, I came across a LinkedIn post and reposts from the CEO, CFO, CCO, and all the other C’s, proudly sharing a project they did with the exact same naming and intention. Another brand, better context.
In retrospect, I’d say the starting point was inappropriate for the brand I chose. It was a big brand, not a challenger one.
But I’m definitely not going to think they came up with the wording and idea by themselves.
I wasn't interviewed, yet I'd been working at that company for six years. Then a CD was hired (we'd never had one before), and at one point, in a Monday team meeting, I presented a detailed idea of how we could improve a product (already on the market). I got close to zero comments and was almost disappointed.
A Disheartening Revelation
But a few months later, that MF came into another Monday meeting and told us [the designers], "I was drinking my coffee this morning, and I was thinking about this product, and we should do something with it..." He was talking about the exact product I'd discussed a few months earlier - and present this as it was his own idea, magically appeared (wow), the idea which the same CD hadn't seemed to care about at the time. This wasn't a coincidence.
The Imposture and Its Aftermath
The guy was purely incompetent, but oh man, he was so good at getting his words into the ears of upper management. The final result? All 13 of us SGDs, who had been working there for more than six years, left. We sniffed out the imposture.
A Call for Transparency
So, the conclusion is there are more CDs and CCOs like this in the world, and there isn't much we can do until there's an honest platform where we can expose them publicly. All the best to everyone! :)
I once thought of a brand collaboration and they the brands announced it months later….
Yes. It happened to me.
Yup. Also you might end up trying to pitch your own idea against an IAT because client wants to “see who can it (your idea) better.”
Yup
Yep! And they can go right the fuck off!