AdamWohl.com

Long overdue: The video/case study for “Sears Conspiracy.”

The backstory: As detailed in an article in AdAge, Sears decided they needed new creative and solicited agencies to pitch them their ideas. The caveat: agencies had to agree to relinquish their creative ideas to Sears, whether they were hired or not, and with no remuneration.  I feel this is insane on the surface, in the middle, and on the bottom with regard to proper brand-agency relation protocol.  Agencies, regardless of their level of desperation for work, must protect their intellectual and creative ideas. It’s all we have.  And unlike the entertainment world — a world in which I have a lot of experience, we do not have the opportunity to register or legally protect our ideas before presenting them.  Unlike the entertainment industry, the creators in advertising do not have a union.  In fact while screenwriters and other entertainment craftsmen and women have agents and lawyers to negotiate on their behalves and protect them from impropriety, ad agencies play the role of both creator and negotiator.  

What’s worse in this example is that Sears itself is just as unwilling to be put in the situation it expects agencies to endure; the literal definition of a hypocrite.  After reading the AdAge article, I remembered that Sears not only sells products, but provides services, among them installations. Anticipating exactly the ultimate outcome, I navigated to the Sears site and the services department and found myself staring at a pop-up window that allowed me to talk to a member of the blue crew — a live internet operator whose job is to facilitate my time on the site — a job that I find absolutely works most of the time, and had I been looking for an item Sears carries, I have no doubt the operator would have made my visit easier and more pleasant. However,  I wasn’t here for a lawnmower.  I was here for evidence and justice.  So I fictitiously claimed to be interested in having a serviceman come to my home to repair my broken air conditioner — in this case my home was the metaphor for Sears corporate office and the broken A/C represented Sears’ broken creative.  I then told the operator that I was planning on having a few repair people come out to diagnose the problem, and asked if the Sears repairman would give me his best educated guess of what was wrong AND tell me exactly how to fix it, before I decided which repairman to go with.  The response: Sears does not provide free estimates.  Evidence?  Yes.  Justice? Not really. I’m not sure what happened with Sears, but I haven’t heard that they’ve hired an agency.

In any respect, I congratulate the leaders of those agencies which decided on principle to hold their ground and not participate in such an exercise.  If nothing else, it sends a signal to the community and more importantly to the creative people at your agency that their work is of value.