Are you sharing your creative? Surprise! It’s called stealing.

Everyone knows the jewelry industry is a business built on many friendships.  Everyone belongs to buying groups, business groups and organizations.  During these buying groups, business groups and organizational meetings, you will see jewelers in non-competitive markets sharing fabulous advertising ideas that have worked for their store.  Let’s face it.  If your marketing has been wildly successful, you’re pretty proud of it, right? The sharing of “ideas” is sometimes the actual basis of a meeting.  Be honest, you’ve participated in some advertising “roundtables”. Which brings me to ask this very important question:

If you pay an agency to create an advertisement for your store, who owns the rights?

You’re not going to like the answer.

Unless a written agreement is in place transferring rights, nine times out of ten, you are simply owning a license to use the work for a specified time – or under the term of the contract.  Technically, even if you commissioned a freelance designer to create a print ad that includes a new logo, graphic illustrations and copy, the copyright belongs to the designer.  If you want to use any of those materials in another advertisement, you either need authorization from the designer or payment might be due for additional usage.

Think of it this way: You create a custom design for a customer.  Who owns the mold or the design?  The customer paid you. Can they take your design; start a business of their own; and make hundreds of thousands of dollars off it?  Same analogy.  Any creative output that ends up being a tangible product remains under the creator’s ownership.

You can not take an entire campaign or its pieces and parts simply because your jeweler buddy says that it’s okay.  Your buddy does not own the rights to the work and in some cases – should the creator find out – they certainly have the right to sue you for using materials without permission.

Follow these simple rules:

1. You should always have a written agreement with your advertising agency or any independent contractor.  Make sure the agreement spells out the usage of work created on your behalf.

2. Consider the price you are paying for the work.  For example, are you paying for a logo to be used locally and then you decide to take it nationally?  That’s a very different creative and business circumstance.

3. Think about what’s important to you for long-term usage.  Many campaigns run their course.  So owning an ad forever may not be important.

4. In many cases you fire an agency due to two things:  bad service or bad creative (or both). In reality, do you want to continue to use the very same creative that may not be working?

Creative companies and individuals sell their intellectual property – the outcome being an item like a print ad or television commercial.  You sell the same – be it a design for one customer or a new line.  Don’t use any creative work without the proper authority.  Otherwise you’ll be selling it – and you – short.

Want to know more about sharing creative? Email suits@fruchtman.com

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By Ellen Fruchtman on January 19, 2010 :: Filed under Think
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