Hi, production companies and/or houses. We see you…and we’d like to have a quick discussion.
We know that it’s hard to get noticed in an industry that devotes most of its attention to the creative AORs and, of course, the clients. We’re aware that many of you are successful businesses with hard-working employees who are almost certainly just as talented as the people working at those agencies.
And we’re glad to post your work here, along with everyone else’s, so our readers can tear it apart anonymously.
That said, we need to establish a couple of things: you are distinct entities from advertising agencies. You know this and we know this. No matter how many press releases you send with YOUR staffers’ names conveniently placed above the names of the AOR’s team in the creative credits, we will not treat you as the equivalent of an advertising agency. This is not a good or bad thing; it’s just a thing.
If you’ve got some recent work you want to promote, you should feel free to send it for consideration with all the other stuff that lands in our inboxes.
But first, some basic guidelines:
1) If we have already posted on the spots you’re sending, don’t pitch them. You don’t actually have to read this blog. Just do yourself a favor with a quick Google search.
2) If this campaign is three months old but you’ve just gotten permission to send it out because the client wants to win a second wave of press mentions, don’t pitch it.
3) If there has been some internal debate about which party gets credit for which work, please consider before you decide to pitch it — especially if this debate has not been resolved.
4) If you want to send out a version of the spot that your team preferred rather than the one that eventually ran, don’t pitch it.
5) If the material you have has not been approved for release by the client, the AOR, or some combination thereof, then for God’s sake DO NOT PITCH IT!
We get that errors can occur in the communications exchanged by otherwise professional people. But we would not be writing this post if the issue had not come up with some regularity over the past six months. If you jump the gun and pitch us something that’s not really yours to pitch before realizing your mistake after the fact, don’t ask us to take it down. Once you press “send” you’ve passed it along to the world at large.
And once it’s been posted, via the assets you sent us with the instruction to download, upload to YouTube and share with our readers, do not report our personal pages to Google for copyright violations. You screwed up, and you can deal with the consequences.
If this keeps happening, we will call out the responsible companies by name. And we don’t think their clients would like that very much.
Thanks!