• Come on, work for free. Pretty please?

    Posted on March 28th, 2006 by and currently 5 commenting.

    Got this email late last night:

    We are in the midst of a logo design/branding work for a new global 24-hour musicTV channel about to launch soon. We have been receiving submissions from a variety of design/branding companies and I visited your website last night and was quite intrigued, so I would like to know more about the people involved and if you are willing to submit some rough draft ideas without upfront fees, etc……..?
    The thing is, our deadline is VERY soon so we have made a tentative end to receiving submissions by this Friday Mar 31. I could send you all of the written info on the company and what our design needs are etc if you are at all interested.

    Good grief. Will an airline let me fly for free to see if I like it? Will Cingular let me have a phone for free for a month to see if it suits me? Yeah, right.
    Look, we don’t sell our time. We sell our ideas. And when we give them away, we devalue them and make them common. It is a plague that runs rampant in our industry. Is this a tempting offer? Hell yeah. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that spec work, RFPs ” all of it ” is ridiculous. If you give away work, you are automatically putting yourself in a lesser position. And once you’re there, it’s hard to get back to equal ground.

    So stand up and take pride in what you do. Creatives might be a dime a dozen. But truly talented creatives are rare. Don’t give away your livelihood in hopes that it will lead to work that pays, because the reality of it is that it rarely ever does.

  • http://www.jasonrbarry.com Jason B

    This is a topic that’s been cropping up lately. Canadian design firm smashLAB posted a similar position on their blog, . And SpeakUp listed on their latest, monthly “Quipsologies” entry.

    I’ve wrestled with this at my former employer, constantly questioning why we would bend over backwards to produce “spec” work. I even had an instance during my job search last year where an agency asked me to create an ad for one of their clients. No brief, no research, and no guarantee of a full interview, let alone the job. Ugh, it’s bad enough that potential clients ask us for “free” work, but do we have to do it to ourselves too?

  • SCBPrincess

    Spike, thank you for this post. I’m not even in the creative business, but what you are saying is so right on.

  • http://theinnovativemarketer.blogs.com Steve Gershik

    I don’t think you should give your ideas (or your time) away for free.

    While this email seems to reveal a clueless prospect, I can tell you from the client perspective what the emotion is behind such a request: fear.

    In past jobs when I engaged an agency, I had a bundle of insecurities:

    - Was their portfolio work done by people who no longer work there?

    - Is the account team who meets with me the team that will ultimately service my business?

    - Do these guys really “get” my company?

    - How can I be sure that I’m important enough a client to get the attention I need?

    - Is this agency’s best work behind it?

    And so on. Moments of doubt. Even if the agency was a referral from someone else. Even, sometimes, if I’d done with them in years past.

    The person who brings you in often has to sell you into the company, spending reputation capital in addition to dollars, so understanding the question behind the questions clients ask will help the relationship in the long term.

  • http://www.beapowerplayer.com Vicki Kunkel

    The moment you give away your ideas, your concepts, your suggestions for free, that’s the moment you make your product or service a commodity. Even “diagnosing the problem” for no charge is giving away too much. Why? Because once the prospet has had a professional diagnose the problem and suggest possible solutions, then the prospect will take your diagnosis and solutions to other competitors and ask, “So how much could you do this for?”

    Prospects who do this are either (a) cheap or (b) fearful (as one writer above suggested.) If they are fearful, I’ve found the best way to overcome this is either to have some metrics in place (this CAN be done with a creative service!) or to offer a money-back guarantee, less non-consultant expenses. I’ve been in business for eleven years and have offered this guarantee to propects who were “on the fence.” In eleven years, no one has ever asked for refund. A lot has to do with the pre-qualifying WE do up front of THE PROSPECT.

    It’s a two-way street: the prospect should be interviewing the company but company reps should also be interviewing the prospect.

    There are simply some prospects whom you never want to have as customers. And that’s OK.

  • http://www.OrangeYeti.com Bear

    I think the people at No-Spec.com agree with you.