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Comment by jmisavage | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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