In a three-minute video that is now posted all over the web, TBWA\Worldwide Chairman and Global Director of Media Arts, Lee Clow is seen speaking his mind on the present agency compensation system. Advertising agencies, he believes, are woefully underpaid for the value they provide to brands.
Rightly so, he puts the blame squarely on ad agencies for allowing it to happen. “Unfortunately, in our business, we get paid like we’re doing our clients’ laundry. Somehow we’ve managed to commoditize what we do.”
As he sees it, every other creative art form (photographers, filmmakers, directors, musicians, performers etc.) has “managed to figure out how to get paid for the value of what they create. Get paid, get residuals, allowed to own what creative idea they have delivered to the world.”
What strikes home for me more than anything in Lee’s message is his viewpoint about ideas: “Many of the ideas we create for brands could be listed on the balance sheet of our clients as an asset with millions and millions of dollars in value.” For example: It was TBWA that came up with the Control Wheel device on the iPod (or so the story goes). That’s IP.
It’s no secret that it takes brilliant creative people working in a highly-creative agency to create brilliant ideas. For Apple, that agency was TBWA. One such campaign idea was ‘Think Different’, created when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Job’s wanted a spot that reflected his philosophy—a philosophy he thought would reinforce his then struggling company. The breakthrough TV spot ‘1984’—the most famous Apple ad ever, and probably the most famous commercial ever, introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time, symbolizing the idea of empowerment, with the Mac as a tool for combating conformity and asserting originality.
These were ideas of the highest caliber. And no doubt TBWA was paid well for their effort—but how much could they have made if their fees were tied to sales? Just imagine. Sigue leyendo
