Not sure if it's what you were getting at or not, but "receipts" in the context of the post is a colloquialism for evidence, it doesn't mean literal receipts.
Also, I don't know how business stuff like this works, but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas, aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas? How many classic commercials were actually original ideas of the company whose product was being advertised? Yet we all still consider the polar bears to be a coca-cola commercial, WAZZUUUUUP to be budweiser commercials, etc.
It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now? Of course if coinbase ceo is lying then it's definitely rude not to give credit, but that seems like it's just how these things go.
To convert it to HN-speak, this is like forking an open-source software library, then branding it as your own internal original work. Then the kicker is the Twitter thread where he publicly insults the entire profession of the people they stole it from. So imagine that a company rips off an OSS library, then says something like "no OSS community would have created this."
It breaks an industry-standard norm in the relationship between ad/marketing agencies and client companies. Everyone knows that client companies pay ad agencies. But agencies make their livelihood on their reputation. So everyone who matters in the industry knows that Ken Stewart was behind the Coca-Cola polar bears campaign, or that it was Bill Backer behind the "I'd like to give the world a Coke" campaign. They've been inducted into the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame, which is literally something only ad people care about. Same with number of stars on GitHub.
I don't think either of them come out smelling of roses here, but an ad agency relies on reputation. If a paying client threatens their future revenue by badmouthing them, they're left with two options:
1) say nothing and have future clients think they're incompetent
2) defend themselves and have future clients know they are competent, but won't put up with some of their client's BS.
Neither choice is ideal, but maybe #2 defends their reputation at the same time that it filters out clients that will spout BS like this. Fewer potential clients, maybe less revenue as a result, but more revenue than if clients thought they were incompetent.
If your agency came up a creative Superbowl ad idea, and then the CEO of the company that ran the ad goes and tweets about it, dissing outside agencies (like you), and seems to claim they came up with it internally... how do you get credit for the success of the idea you pitched, since that's a big deal to your business?
I just don't like reading twitter threads. At first I only saw the first 6 tweets of the 12(?) tweet chain because after that it was all just reaction gifs.
That being said I worked at Martin for 11 years. They pitch a ton of ideas to clients all the time and gradually dump most of them. I can easily see the QR code being pitched fairly early by a team and it getting cut.
Just speaking from experience I always take agency talk with a grain of salt. So many big names outsource their work to freelancers, boutique shops, or directors that they’ve used in the past because agency folk don’t want to fully think things through. I would be interested in hearing what Danny Robinson has to say. He’s the CCO at Martin, but I doubt he would take to twitter for this.
Depends on the contract.
What they aren't paying for is the ability to say "these guys we paid couldn't come up with anything so we had to do it ourselves".
Because the agency isn't being paid to have a client bad mouth them in public as mediocre when it was the angency that came up with the idea.
It's crypto. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pay them at all.
That's the dispute, they didn't pay. Coinbase met with Martin, listened to their pitch(es), including something about a floating QR code, then said no thanks.
A few months later Coinbase aired a Super Bowl commercial with a floating QR code, and either claims to have created it in-house or created it with Accenture.
The Martin CEO (Cavallo) has every right to be pissed.