One of the key legal issues for business owners is the protection of their creative assets. While there are many steps you can take to secure your digital assets, one step that’s often overlooked has to do with protecting your marketing assets when working with an agency.
When you work with a marketing agency partner, it’s vital to clarify who owns the rights to your creative assets.
If you designed an invention, you’d certainly work with the U.S. patent office to move toward owning those rights, and the same is true when it comes to marketing assets like your logos and branding.
Today, we’re sharing a set of steps you can take to protect your marketing assets when collaborating with an agency partner and sharing our approach to these matters too.
Define Your Agency Relationship
One essential step you can take to secure your creative assets is align upfront with your marketing agency as to how they regard ownership rights. If you have yet to go to contract, this would be a perfect opportunity to ask if they can share with you some of the fine-print language that they include in their on-boarding paperwork.
While many agencies, including Revelation Creative, err on the side of the client in defining a collaborative relationship where the agency creates and manages your assets while you retain ownership, not every agency does so.
If you’re not sure, it’s best to have this conversation with your agency right away. Additionally, having legal counsel review any agreements provided by a creative partner is a recommended best practice to ensure your rights and ownership are clearly delineated. This review can provide the additional piece of mind knowing that contractually, your agency partner is working for you and not against you. More on this subject to come…
Ask Questions About Creative Asset Ownership
Once you’ve defined the general relationship between your company and the agency, it’s important to ask specific, targeted questions.
From emails and blogs to logos and even videos, if you’re working with an agency you need to get a full picture of the specific assets that you own the rights to and those assets for which the agency retains ownership (if any).
In addition, if that agency is managing any conversion-related data, lead-generation data, or other information regarding your marketing efforts, you’ll want to ask questions regarding the ownership of those assets as well. While they may not be obvious marketing assets, these dashboards and datasets often contain vital information that impacts your business in big ways.
Get It In Writing: The Legal Side Of Asset Ownership
After you’ve established the overarching and more detailed aspects of your creative asset ownership and that of your agency partner, you should make those parameters official.
Putting your ownership in writing, in the form of a contract, helps to cement that ownership in case you move on to another agency or experience any issues with your current agency.
Revelation Creative has a breath of experience working for and with law firms. These relationships have allowed us to grow a robust network of professionals who we can rely upon to answer specific questions about the legality of creative ownership. We often refer our clients to these trusted professionals who we know to be experts in their respective fields – ranging from invention patents to trademark applications and more. We encourage our clients to view legal counsel not as a sunk cost or red line item on your P&L, but to understand that the insights provided to you by legal professionals today can prime you for growth tomorrow and beyond.
Work With An Agency That Willingly Ensures Your Ownership Of Creative Assets
The final step in the process of protecting your marketing and creative assets is to work with an agency that knows how important it is for you to retain ownership of them.
At Revelation Creative, our experience and wealth of connections allow us to ensure that our clients retain ownership of their creative assets because, after all, we’re here to help their businesses grow.
In fact, anything we create for clients becomes their property because we’re passionate about giving them every opportunity to flourish. Our clients work with us by choice, and we value that loyalty. We believe in allowing our collaborative relationship to be one of mutual respect and to keep that integrity intact, we don’t hold reign over their creative assets.
If you’re ready to learn more about working with a team that respects your ownership of creative assets, reach out to us using our contact form here.