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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

Did she post evidence though? She refers to pages of presentations that we don't have access to, so why is she more trustworthy (other than not being the coinbase guy who everyone seems to dislike)?

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.

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> 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.

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.

Thanks for explaining!

yea very unprofessional to undercut the campaign of your PAYING CLIENT to clout chase for yourself.

Not very professional to call your vendor incompetent on creative content when you use their idea.

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.

Coinbase did not pay The Martin Agency for the idea. That's what Cavallo is frustrated about.

They didn't pay this person's agency, they just stole their idea and then went with a different "creative firm."

> It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now?

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 can think of several completely professional alternatives to "calling out" on Twitter.

I think this is why it just rubs me the wrong way. I think twitter is an awful medium for anything substantial, so if I were her, I would have written a blog post or something instead. I'm also aware that twitter is probably better for engagement _and_ she knows much more about engagement than I do.

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.

She’s unprofessional, but she’s only playing by Twitter rules which he knowingly engaged in when he decided to seek even MORE attention for the ad. I have zero sympathy for people who use social media.

The Martin Agency has been named agency of the year 2 years in a row. They’re pretty popular, at least for the moment. The biggest thing to remember is that ideas are the currency that creative people use to get promoted and recognition within the industry. So for a client to steal the idea and not give credit is pretty insulting.

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.

when https://twitter.com/cavallokristen referenced the slide numbers from the pitch deck and dates the client reviewed, that’s basically saying COIN stole the idea. I wonder if they tried to settle this amicably, before taking it to Twitter. If there never was attempt to resolve this in private, that would seem like poor form.

I saw that and I’ll admit that I’m more on Martin’s side on this issue, but without seeing the slides in question its hard to say who is more in the right. Knowing the amount of lawyers Martin and their parent company IPG has I’m sure they had some say in this public squabble. The weird thing is that Accenture made the ad and did get credit from Coinbase. Accenture has been trying to eat away traditional agency business for a long time. I wonder what their side of the story is. It also sounds like Martin didn’t produce much or any work for them. They were named agency of record before their new CMO started. Normally, a CMO picks their own agency.

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.

>aren't they paying for ownership

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.

I'd hire them because they seem to be good at their job.

Absolutely would not work with them now. Going right to the nuclear option is not a good reaction.

Ahh, yes. The way of the MBA. All corporate gobbledegook with filler words that suck the humanity out of every press release, statement, and public performance.

> aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas?

It's crypto. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pay them at all.

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...

> but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas,

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.

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