Crediting Creatives' Creations
Lately the question of ownership and ethics with regard to creative product has come across my desk in more than a few different ways. Hiring consultants like publicists, marketing agencies, advertising agencies, photographers, sign manufacturers, and so on, for some, provides an opportunity for grey areas of ownership. For others the ethical lines are and have been always clear: never take credit for someone else's work or ideas. How will what I'm about to discuss ultimately result in a net gain? People talk. Any good marketer knows that bad publicity is a hundred times worse than one good deed. People want to do business with people they can trust. And the extension of honesty goes much farther than the contract.
My professor of Business Ethics at the University of Buffalo, William Baumer, (unfortunately for him), started me on this path of the ethical debate. He still stands as a pillar in my mind of a person I greatly admire and who has taught me to walk away from anything unethical. If you're reading this Dean Baumer, thank you for all of your encouragement, mentorship, and advice over the years.
This marvelous ad created by Ogilvy's 12th Floor agency for British Airlines is such a dynamite idea. British Airways paid for the agency to create their ad and in all cases they gave Ogilvy credit for the ad. British Airways owns the ads...but they didn't claim to have come up with the idea, concept, or even the development of the ad. In fact every article goes out of its way to state that "The campaign was created by Ogilvy's 12th Floor agency." When a consultant such as myself comes into a firm and strategically plans, creates and implements a campaign for a client, the company that paid for my agency to create the ad, or develop a campaign concept cannot say that they were the thought providers and pitch the concepts as though they created everything in-house. Some people seem unclear about this issue. I'm always shocked when an executive says, "But, I paid for it, therefore I own it." Owning a book you paid for is different than saying you wrote the book.
A while back I read a fascinating article in my Phi Beta Kappa magazine The American Scholar that discussed the issue of students cheating at major universities. The entire debate inside the article would give any creative pause, but the justification for taking credit for another's work is frightening: "The most appalling aspect of the rise of cheating on campus in recent times is that some professors themselves have offered sophisticated defenses of plagiarism. An ambitious student can now turn to the writings of teachers who have made ingenious theoretical defenses for the very cheating practices proscribed by the universities at which they teach. If a student faces the accusation that his work is not original, that student can respond: Don't you know that the idea of "originality" has been hammered into nothingness by thinkers such as Michel Foucault? After all, he proclaimed four decades ago that the very idea of an author, any author, is dead, and hence there is no one around to claim originality. Instead, wrote Foucault, in What Is an Author?, we should welcome a new world in which the inhibiting codes of authorship have been cast to the winds: All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? ... And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? Once a student adopts, under so impressive an aegis as Foucault, an indifference about authorship, the coast is clear and all noisome ethical restrictions can be jettisoned." While speaking with a professional photographer the other day, I heard her go on and on about people who come to her website and steal her images. And a thought leader I admire said he could no longer throw out award boards from juried shows as people retrieved them from the garbage and would pass off the work as their own--when the projects were not even remotely theirs. It boggles the mind. We live in a small town no matter how big our city. People gossip. In the world of business, trust is king--not cash. For publicists, their bread and butter comes from their relationship with editors and publishers. One sure way to lose that relationship is to shop a story or project to another editor after promising it to the former. For the service industry that I'm in, ethical behavior rarely needs contracts or policing, you just keep handshake promises, not because you're afraid of being caught if you don't, but because it's the right thing to do if you plan to stay in business. Leaders have a responsibility to their employees to set the right examples. Studies have shown that where company executives support unethical behavior, the honest people soon depart. There's a fabulous article in The Economist that talks about the Harvard Business School's course on how businesspeople should guard against an obsession with short-term success. Occasionally overconfidence develops into an arrogance which then translates into an invincible attitude promoting a greater stretch of the truth. One study in the Harvard Business Review showed how "liars with power were hard to distinguish from subjects telling the truth." In the end, like so many other things in life, honesty and goodwill always trump the dark side. May the peace be with you. During this holiday season, please take the time to appreciate those around you who have supported your company with their creative gifts. May 2014 be fruitful, healthy, and happy. Thank you,
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