Thanks for the response. One thing to emphasise is that I’m not knocking confused.com by any means. I think what they’ve done here is, as I said in my post, refreshing because it’s unusual. And it’s not confused.com’s fault that the generally accepted way to charge for ideas in the PR industry is to revert back to the hourly rate model. I guess my point is really about the PR industry finding a better ( for better I mean charge more!) way to value its creativity and to then have the balls to actually stick to it.

I run an agency (web and graphic design) and like your PR perspective, we are rarely in the position to charge for an idea; I have the scar tissue to prove it.

Like you, we pitch for jobs on our own time, and at our own cost. In nine years we have only been offered a fee for a pitch once; and then it certainly was not proportionate to the work undertaken or the value of the idea. However I respected the client for offering it and graciously declined, as it came with a caveat (more below).

What transpired next was interesting, they wanted the other agency to produce the job (a catalogue) but wanted to use aspects of the visuals we produced as part of our pitch. This we reasoned was worth at least the time invested, at full charge-out rates and we priced it accordingly. The client paid.

Whilst I openly rally for more clients like Confused.com – I don’t think it right to knock them for any metric they might use to value the pitch; providing they do not wish to use the ideas. I would probably accept this as a gesture and a contribution for our efforts; knowing we will have imparted some knowledge.

Taking a moment, to sip a cup of tea, what might help is a declaration from the outset that losing pitches will be paid a flat fee of £x as a contribution for their time and attention – with a clause covering usage rights for any aspects of the pitch that the client might wish to cherry pick.

Thank you for a thought provoking article, I look forward to seeing it evolve through comments.

p.s. I recently read somewhere that a creative person can be ten times more effective (valuable) than a non-creative person; perhaps this is a metric we could use 10x hourly rate for ideas.

Rest assured, I rather dislike the term ‘ideation’ too – I heard it, funnily enough, from an advertising guy.

Re ideabounty.com, it’s a nice idea insomuch as it certainly stimulates creative thinking in general terms and it may then create strong campaign ideas. But I think to deliver really good creative thinking you need to have received a very strong brief from the client and been able to go back and forth on that brief. Not sure ideabounty quite allows the client/agency dynamic to work in this way? The brief, to me, is all – rubbish in, rubbish out. It’s also because of this that I’m not sure crowdsourcing poses a significant threat to the traditional agency model just yet…

Getting paid for ideas really ought to be based on whether they’re any good. That means, a) do they get used, and b) if they do get used, does the end punter behave differently as a result.

Getting paid to sit around drinking lattes and ruminating is probably not too appealing to clients.

Getting paid for making a difference to someone’s business will be.

A really progressive step from Confused.com’s team, but I suspect one that (for some of the reasons you raise above) won’t be taken by too many others.

Still, reading the story brightened my day a little.

Some interesting business models placing a value of creativity are cropping up at the moment. What are your thoughts in ideabounty.com? Does crowdsourcing creativity pose an opportunity or a threat to PR agencies such as Bite?