Happily Misunderstood

“Unilever is offering $10,000 (£6,087) in a competition to find ideas for its next TV campaign for snack food brand Peperami, using its quirky Animal character, as it decides to drop its ad agency of 16 years and turn to crowdsourcing for creative ideas.”

Interesting article in the Media Guardian today, Lowe have been fired in favour of consumer crowdsourcing of creative work. There’s one interesting catch though, consumers will have to use the Peperami ‘Animal’ character in their concepts. I’m guessing that the character was invented by Lowe and practically given away to Unliever for next to nothing, with Lowe making their money back via billing the hours involved in the roll out of the idea.

Unilever’s “so long and thanks for all the fish” approach is undoubtedly worrying for agencies, but it also presents an opportunity for more beneficial ways of charging for what we do best – ideas. If Lowe had managed to negotiate an intellectually property contract, rather than a fee based contract, they’d be laughing now. A few ways this could work:

• The agency owns the IP on the idea, the Client pays to lease it for as long as they need to, after which the ownership of the idea reverts to the agency
• The agency and Client jointly own the IP on the idea, the agency are paid a percentage of all profits the brand makes whilst the idea is in use, regardless of who is executing the creative

Agencies like Anomaly have been experimenting with this model but it seems like wide scale adoption is a while off.

I’m sure there’s load already written on this, I’ll link to it as I find it.