Back in 2007 I attended
MadInSpain where there was a nice discussion where 5 of the top heads of Spanish advertising agencies had a chat about the industry.
One of the ideas floating around was that in the rather near future agencies were not going to be able to have specialists on each field. You know: backend, sysadmins, traditional Flash animation, pure ActionScript developers, HTML, CSS, JS, Papervision, Motion Graphics.... The range of things an on-line agency has to do these days is sooo wide that the amount of people involved is huge. But for most of the very specific fields they only have 1 or 2 projects a year. So they face either:
1) Have someone with mixed skills that is not a trully specialist but can work on very different projects all year long or
2) Bring in that specialist who's going to do an amazing job but have him/her without actual work to do for 6 months.
We know #2 is not going to happen, but if they go for #1 they don't get amazing products. Bummer. So what these guys were saying is that, same as off-line agencies contact a TV production company to film an actual TV ad, they will eventually do the same and outsource the production of their ideas to smaller but very specialized studios.
I put a great idea, you put a great production, we make a great product. Sounds like a win-win situation for everybody, right? Well,
almost.
And here's the little problem:
on-line agencies do NOT give credit. When you work for them and they win an award, you are not in the picture. You are not even on the credits. Damn, you cannot even publicly say that you were part of that project in your website. And that's unfair. Ok it's their client, ok it's their idea but your ideas go too on the product.
You built it. I think you should be able to at least add the project to your public portfolio.
So, big bosses of on-line agencies that read this blog: I think it's a very good idea that you outsource production to smaller studios but with one condition:
you have to give credit where credit belongs. Don't be greedy.