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.

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?