The backlash was swift from each tradition media and the social media sphere, with audiences accusing Sweetgreen of thought theft and being downright hypocritical. However this incident is about one thing rather more than a not-so-good search for Sweetgreen. It’s about how the promoting business has created a “Free Concepts Economic system.”
Businesses and types have been complicit in normalizing the expectation that producing artistic concepts is a price of doing enterprise. We’ve resigned to the truth that creating campaigns on spec is the best way for an company to get its foot within the door, hoping to be rewarded with a long-term, sticky company of file contract.
I take a look at this Free Concepts Economic system as each an company founder and an in-house model chief. I understand how worthwhile a good suggestion will be. It will possibly drive gross sales, win hearts and minds, and even change the world. So why are concepts typically the very last thing manufacturers are keen to pay for? Why are nice concepts one thing companies are nonetheless keen to provide away at no cost? Why isn’t the business doing extra to stop this?
The Kale Camo Hoodie incident ought to function a wake-up name for our whole business to rethink how we worth, defend, and compensate for artistic ideas. Finally, the factor we’re all right here for within the artistic promoting and model group is the factor no one desires to pay for.
How does the advert business clear up this and return to a market the place companies are paid for concepts? How can we give companies the popularity, safety, and monetary reward they deserve? Simply as importantly, how do shoppers develop into equal companions in dismantling the Free Concepts Economic system?
On the company facet, extra outlets should undertake progressive fashions engineered to compensate for ideation, pitching, and being on-call to show round concepts. Businesses should additionally diligently use nondisclosure agreements and mental property safety clauses in pitch-related paperwork, even stipulating that the concepts shoppers don’t elect to make use of stay company property. Authorized readability is sweet, and memorializing these conversations can serve each side.
On the model facet, shoppers must view artistic ideation as a working price, a product to be commissioned and paid for. That features paying a price to companies collaborating in a pitch course of. Manufacturers should additionally collaborate with companies on new frameworks that shake up the usual and stodgy AOR mannequin. They should construct relationships that incentivize companies to supply extra creativity on faucet somewhat than perpetuating the Free Concepts Economic system.
