An Advertising Agency Publishes A Book.Who Gets The Royalties?
January 24, 2008
Did you know that Philadelphia was our hometown? Probably not. We never get the chance to mention it as we were unaware of anything poppin’ out of the city of Brotherly Love. Finally, we get to give a big shout out to cheesesteaks, big bottom girls and West Philly en mass by way of ad agency, Stick and Move.
Stick and Move is made up of two guys (Steve O’Connell and Jared Scott) who previously worked at Crispin + Porter. As far as we can tell, this is not a spin-off that is actually funded by Crispin. S+M (we can be so juvenile, sorry) is one of a number of small agencies who executes work for big brands, but signs those pesky non-disclosure agreements, so no one ever hears about it. Sigh. The trouble with being small…
However, we got wind of a strange occurrence for any ad agency - big or small - and decided to investigate. Stick and Move (we’re over the S+M joke, promise) was charged with creating a 20-page brochure of common option strategies for their client, an online trading firm called TradeKing. We had to look them up. Turns out the company was recently rated the top discount broker by SmartMoney Magazine. Who knew? Anyway, TradeKing wanted this pamphlet to be sent to valued traders, and as an acquisition piece for prospective clients. Now, the book is being published by a major publishing house, Wiley. How much you want to bet Stick and Move got no part of that deal?
How it went from brochure to book is due to the Philadelphia based shop’s IDEO like tendencies. They did some research and found out that increasing client knowledge could increase profit by educating what are considered casual traders (more knowledge = more confidence = more money spent). So, Stick produced a 100+ page book called The Options Playbook.
And here’s where the advertising agency gets screwed as usual. Business Week gave it a bunch of praise, as did USA Today, but… Stick and Move will get no credit. The client felt that it was better to have their names as the author of the book. Imagine that. And because there was no agreement in place from the get go, and so and so on, Stick is left out in the cold for what is undeniably superior work.
Life lesson: IP people and pay for performance schemes. It’s the only sensible future.
In the mean time, we’ll say Stick and Move is one to watch.
January 24, 2008 at 9:55 pm
This brings up a great question for debate.
I understand that a client hires an agency to concept and produce work for them for a fee, but at what point does the agency or the team involved lose any and all ownership?
Case in point, the Geico Caveman campaign. It was created by Joe Lawson (And others) at The Martin Agency, but made into a hit TV show… sorry, hit to do it.
How does something like this happen? Does Geico have to sign off on it? Do they have any say? Does The Martin Agency?
Kevin Proudfoot at W+K NYC is doing something somewhat similar with “Nimrod Nation,” which seems to be at least loosely based on an ESPN “Without Sports” campaign.
Can anyone clear this up?
January 30, 2008 at 2:38 am
Hey there,
I’m a writer at Stick and Move and co-author of The Options Playbook along with Brian Overby, TradeKing’s Director of Education. Thanks for the coverage on our agency and the book, not to mention the love for the Illadelph.
When the partners here decided to keep our agency name off the book, everyone figured if we can make our clients famous, recognition to us would come naturally. So we put the spotlight squarely on TradeKing. Needless to say, we’ve been really stoked that the book received such amazing reviews in the industry and nice press coverage too, so it’s been great for everyone involved.
Once the book got picked up by Wiley last fall, TradeKing agreed to credit us fully without hesitation, and the new edition comes out this summer, complete with props to Stick and Move. So we all make out fine, believe it or not. In all honesty, we couldn’t be happier with the situation.
As for royalties, we never really looked at this project as a money maker, and have been very pleasantly surprised by its success.
If we figured a book on option trading might out-sell The DaVinci Code, Jared and Steve wouldn’t have been quite so willing to sign away our rights, and it probably would have involved some unusual negotiations beyond our standard agreement. Although I will say that after tapping Brian Overby for everything he knows, I’ve done a lot better trading options on TradeKing.com than any royalies Stick and Move might have seen. So I’m not complaining. Heh-heh.
Thanks again for the article. The subject of agency compensation in odd situations like this is definitely worthy of further exploration. I wondered some of the same things Kirk mentioned in his post above, and would be interested to see what other folks in the ad biz think.
Thanks also for being the first writer to call out the S&M abbreviation. We were wondering when that was finally going to happen. Keep on doin’ that voodoo that you do so well.