Here’s a novel concept. I read a great MediaPost article, then took action, and it profoundly helped my business. If you are like 99.9% of creative agencies out there, you pitch business on an informal or formal basis and give some of your ideas away in hopes of tempting the prospective client to actually pay you for strategy and idea implementation. Up until this past week, we at eROI have given our ideas away in the form of a custom proposal. Thankfully, as an interactive agency that works with many other agencies, we seldomly do full-blown pitches with spec creative work. However, we have had several prospects and even current customers take our ideas without paying for them and either implement them in-house, or use an intern, or hire another agency to do at least a piece of the work.
In short, we haven’t protected ourselves until now. And, protection is a good thing – it prevents pregnancies, STDs, and a substantial loss of money if your ideas are taken without any compensation. You may ask, “aside from condoms, what sort of protection are you referring to?” We recently created a 2-page document that is similar to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but is much less intimidating. We now require all prospective creative clients to sign this before our discussions and custom proposals. So far, so good. I’ll let you know when we receive our first pushback on this new process. Until then, I highly recommend other agencies to do the same.
I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called 
