Mark Dapin, a regular contributor to the Good Weekend magazine in the SMH and The Age is launching a new book on October 1 through Harper Collins called "Fridge magnets are bastards".

To promote the book he has an article in todays Good Weekend where he describes "bastards I have known". It is full of the usual "weasle words" like "learning curve", "same page" and "magic bullet", but the one that caught my eye was "marketing guru".

Continue reading "Beware the marketing guru? Or is that the invisible elephant?" »

In a recent discussion with an agency managing director they were again talking about the value of their ideas and how they should be remunerated for the value of these ideas.

I have two problems with this:

1. As you will hear in this interview with Trevor Choy of Choy Lawyers, there is no copyright in an "idea". Copyright and IP exists in the works produced from the idea.

2. The advertisers usually assumes that they have paid for the value of the IP in their existing remuneration. That is why there is usually a clause assigning all IP to the advertiser on payment of the agency fee.

Continue reading "Intellectual Property in Advertising" »

Single client agencies are created when either an advertisers funds the establishment of an agency either from a green field around a few key agency people (usually from their existing agency) or an agency opens a new office simply to service a single client.

There are some obvious and notable examples of where advertisers have created agencies to service their business, such as the now defunct 360 for the Commonwealth Bank and the still operating Media Store of Toyota.

While obviously some of these are successful, these arrangements are more likely to suffer a series of issues that means they often fail to thrive.

Continue reading "The curse of the single client agency" »

With the increased complexity of marketing requirements, more and more advertisers and their agencies are moving to an "all you can eat" approach to their remuneration model.

This has the advertiser paying a fixed retainer for a year to secure a fix agency resource to deliver all of the advertisers needs from strategy planning, creative devleopment through to production supervision and in some cases all of those small but essential jobs like presentation development.

Although the simplicity of the "all you can eat" model is attractive there are some fundamental issues that quickly arise from this approach.

Continue reading "The dangers of the "all you can eat" agency remuneration" »