The agency says...
Hollywood rewards copycats. So does Madison Avenue. As children, we are taught not to copy other people's work, but as adults, we are encouraged to DO EXACTLY WHAT THE OTHER PEOPLE DID TO MAKE MONEY. Call it free enterprise if you will, but how else can we justify Pepsi after Coca Cola, "K-9" after "Turner and Hooch" and those stupid day-glo rubber bracelets with encouraging words printed on them that everybody cashed in on after Lance Armstrong made them fashionable?
So when you are an agency tasked with pitching on a project that may or may not be awarded to you, what happens to those wonderful ideas that you and your team brainstormed? Ideas, after all, are precious commodities. Each and every idea is special. There are no bad ideas, just bad people. And sometimes, when people don't have any ideas of their own, they just DO EXACTLY WHAT THE OTHER PEOPLE DID TO MAKE MONEY.
It is a story repeated over and over in every business in the world.
They stole my idea.
What can you do, and how can you stop it from happening?
The sad truth is, you can't. A good idea is just that: a good idea. An agency is selling not only the idea -- which sometimes is itself an amorphous moving target -- but also the interpretation of said idea and, ultimately, its execution.
While I don't have a solution, I do have an anecdote to share:
Back in the early days of online movie marketing, my company pitched on a project that we did not get, much to our surprise. We were convinced that we should have been awarded the project, as we have always enjoyed an extraordinarily high success rate of turning pitches into projects, and our egos just couldn't accept defeat. But, we finally let it go and turned our attention elsewhere.
A few months later, people from that same studio called us with an unusual request. They wanted us to do a special feature for the film website that they had awarded to someone else. Intrigued, we accepted the job. They explained to us that they had conceived of a fully fleshed-out idea, and they just wanted us to execute it.
When we arrived for the meeting, we were pitched -- verbatim -- a very prominent feature from our original proposal: the proposal that they didn't want.
So now, they wanted us to execute their "exciting and original new feature concept," which was really our old, mothballed, unwanted feature concept that had been exiled to the sad and lonely island of misfit ideas.
Bottom line: People will do seemingly anything it takes to DO EXACTLY WHAT THE OTHER PEOPLE DID TO MAKE MONEY.
There is no combative cure. Our business is built on relationships, mutual respect and quality of work. The key, of course, is to have a surplus inventory of ideas and the ability to create new ideas out of thin air on the spot, anytime, anywhere.
Because, as a creative agency, that is our job.