Comment by callmeed
12 years ago
Seriously, what is it with "Agencies" lately? Who the F--k are these people?
I have heard/experienced a dozen similar stories recently. I have a friend who left a huge agency to freelance–only to have another small agency work him to the bone and take advantage of him almost exactly like the story here.
YES I ABSOLUTELY GET THAT THE ONUS IS ON THE FREELANCER/SUB TO GET THEIR CONTRACTS IN PLACE ...
But, seriously, these people are ridiculous. A bunch of salespeople in suits tossing around buzzwords so they can land a job taking advantage of a big company's big budget. Everything is a pitch or a comp or a big lead.
My advice to all freelance hackers and designers: if you meet someone who says they work at an agency, (a) tell them you're a janitor and (b) run away.
If HN will excuse my rant...
They're parasites and bottom dwellers empowered by the fact that online marketing lowered the entry bar into marketing.
During my 5-year experience with them, I quit in one where I worked full-time, worked with several dozen of these 'agencies', my ex works for one, and I am due payment tommorow by one. I'm drawing a line here (not nudged by this letter, I've come to that decision few weeks back) - I'll never work with them again.
Their job is to suck your soul out, give you peanut shells, and kiss asses to their clients. They're never satisfied with the results, they won't pay the market rate, they abuse their employees. At first agency, I worked 120h a week, for several months, on several ocassions. Ended up in ER twice, lost an organ (gallbladder) and seriously damaged another (chronic gastritis) in short period of time, had micronap hallucinations regulary. Yes, I should've known better. Youthful energy got the best of me. It got best out of all their other employees, almost all who have left "violently". I was 27 at that point.
On a more lighter note - old school marketeers with vision, concept and drive now get even more respect from me. I didn't appreciate them enough when I started, thinking that they're not doing enough "numbers". Tough times for them and it's a shame. They'll be back on horse soon enough, I hope. There ought to be data-sucking ad-providing backlash at one point, right? Tell me it is so.
Their job is to suck your soul out, give you peanut shells, and kiss asses to their clients.
Correct. And your job as a freelancer is to do the same thing. I feel slightly sorry for this guy, but his failure to get any kind of deal memo or contract in place shows him to be an amateur.
EDIT: I extended my original comment as it was so brief as to be potentially confusing.
As for ripping off his design for the poster - nope. I recognized the visual concept immediately as a fan of Chan Wook Park's original Oldboy of which this is a remake. Here's a publicity still from the film: http://byt.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...
So the notion of a man emerging from a packing case in an empty field is part of the scripted action of the film, not Mr Garcia's idea. The image of a woman in the background is also related to a story element (which I'd prefer not to explain lest it spoil the plot) and I'm willing to bet she appears with similar costuming in the film. The fonts, layout and content of the textual elements are wholly different And far more inspired by the publicity materials of the Korean original.
The marketing company should not be employing Mr Garcia's material on their social networking pages. However, it's unsurprising that whoever is in charge of the social media marketing would assume that any and all art assets were the products of a work-for-hire agreement as that is normal practice within the industry. however, this also has to viewed in the light of:
Early in the conversation the agency told me that I could publish the work as my own for the “exposure” so since I knew I was not going to getting paid I put the posters in my portfolio.
This is a grey area. An industry portfolio is generally understood to be for exhibition to other clients. Standard practice for cinematographers, production designers and other keys etc. is to either a) negotiate a release for copyrighted materials to be part of a public demo reel or b) to limit access to the demo reel to potential clients, eg by using password-protected videos on vimeo or sending publicity stills privately through email, samples of recorded dialog (if you're a sound person, as I am). And so on. Again, this is the sort thing that is usually established in a deal memo, and such a normal situation that it's typically boilerplate.
Without such an agreement, any claim by Mr Garcia that the pictures in his portfolio were official key art in any capacity (even unused) verges on being an implicit appropriation of trademarks, publicity rights, and/copyrighted material (to they extent that they employed any elements from production stills etc.), as distinct from mere 'fan art.'
Now, it's bad that Mr Garcia got no contract in place but I really think there is a bit more to this story, because the first thing any producer learns on anything but the most amateur-hour production is to get legal releases for any and all performances or copyrighted material on a work-for-hire basis. contractual relations are the lifeblood of the film business and even small indie productions with budgets of only a few thousand dollars use boiler plate agreements.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked in this field for a decade and I've been party or witness to disputes about ownership of work from both sides of the table. I don't find Mr Garcia's version of events entirely persuasive.
Correct. And your job as a freelancer is to do the same thing.
I'm sorry for you feel that way. You can opt-in in making a meaningful and fruitful business relations instead? Shame it's an opt-in, and not opt-out, though. I guess Bible's right on that one.
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So long as the author/designer didn't have a contract in place to sell his work, then they don't own it and he retains copyright. As a result they're committing criminal copyright infringement and he should be referring this to the FBI for federal prosecution. They will have zero ability to prove that they own the work so I imagine it might go very well for the designer.
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Wrong wrong wrong! Even if you don't want to participate in their way of doing business - there's an _enormous_ amount of very high value skills you can learn from them.
"A bunch of salespeople in suits tossing around buzzwords so they can land a job taking advantage of a big company's big budget. Everything is a pitch or a comp or a big lead."
That is indeed exactly the difference between most "agencies" and most small design firms/freelancers.
The agency has salespeople who know how to value and sell the work a freelancer can do, for an order of magnitude or so more money that that freelance will negotiate for themselves. You might think "I could give that company what they want in a few days with WordPress, a great theme I'm already very familiar with, and a solid day's worth of graphic design and css futzing - I'd do it for a friend for a few grand, but they're a big company so I'll see if I can get away with charging them $8 or $10 grand…". And you'd quite likely lose the job to the agency who comes in talking about Business Goals and Website Goals, Audience Demographics, Conversions, SMART metrics, Information Architecture, User Interface and User Experience design, Content Inventories, Conversion focused and SEO focused copywriting, Social Media integration, broader alignment with current marketing activity, leveraging existing business relationships and co-branding key messages - they'll spend two weeks (billing by the hour) talking to key stakeholders and decision makers at the client (while dressed, as you point out, in smart suits), then submit a proposal for a $280,000 project and, in case the budget doesn't stretch that far, a simpler $150,000 version. And they'll also have the known-effective "sales closer" tactics, probably something like "we've got a few slots open in out pipeline next quarter, I'm pretty sure if we could get this approved and signed before the end of the month I could talk finance into a 12% discount on a full upfront payment…"
The _good_ agencies will actually deliver a lot more business value that a freelancer with a good design eye, a folderful of WordPress themes, and a GoDaddy hosting reseller account.
A _bad_ agency will just have search/replaced the company name in their previous pitch powerpoint decks and web project proposal docs - and deliver a not-very-varefully-planned canned-theme WordPress site anyway, probably farmed out for $8k to some freelancer with the promise of heaps of future work and some great exposure…
Knowing which clients are going to get $100k+ value out of a project, then pitching a proposal based on value delivered, rather than hours worked. _That's_ what a successful agency does. (And what most freelancers have very little idea how to do.)
No, not really. From my anecdotal experience, which does include many a project exceeding the amounts you cited, it usually goes like this (paraphrased):
Agency's army of spineless sales people [1] spends a lot of time ass licking many people, one of them happens to love his anus tickled in that manner, then he dumps a bag of money to them, they spend 90% of that money pumping ads, and 10% on development of what's supposed to masquerade as a 'marketing campaign'. Anus-tickle-lover still gets a nice spreadsheet at the end of the month ('Yay, profits!') and they all live happily ever after.
Well, not all. In-house developers crook their spine to the will of their masters and get an occassional team-building event paid for, and outsourced developers get eaten alive in the witch's cabin.
[1] It helps if you're a handsome woman. A fact, sir. No citation needed. Desired even.
Heh - I suspect the main difference between your description of the process and mine is that I'm in a "third cup of coffee, should be on my way to the office" timezone, and I'm guessing your in a "finished at the office, savouring the third beer" timezone, and hence we've got slightly different sates of mind and social inhibitions. But I'm sure we both know exactly what each other is describing.
(Surely you have seen the occasional great non-literal-ass-licking salespeople working for genuinely great marketing agencies? And agencies that deliver _spectacular_ word and achive magnificent results for clients? I'm quite proud to have been told I came in second with pitches against a few agencies I'm particularly impressed by in my small space here… But I will beat them one day, Oh yes…)
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Shhh, nobody was supposed to know landing huge-ass contracts involves sucking dick. On a serious note, I guess bigiain's point was that freelancers that know better usually have no clue about bringing business value to the table.
Good point. The internet is a wonderland!
> My advice to all freelance hackers and designers: if you meet someone who says they work at an agency, (a) tell them you're a janitor and (b) run away.
c) Tell them you don't do spec work, because you're not a moron - fuck you pay me.
Agency finds naive freelancer, offers a job for exposure & other bullshit, overwhelms with fixes/updates, pretends being dissatisfied/offended, refuses to pay. This kind of story is as old as freelancing itself, only the names of parties involved change.
PSA for inexperienced freelancers: Nobody will unclog your crapper for a promise of future gigs, designers and programmers shouldn't put up with such scams either. Too many of us gained this wisdom the hard way.
Sales, SEO and those doing middle work are loaded with "GOALS" that never are enough by the employers. It is sickening what they do. The lack of respect for the true working class is only going to get better if we shut out these type of services.