Du dilemme de la rémunération à l'heure

Lee Clow, président et chef de la création de TBWA\Worldwide, fait connaître son avis sur la compensation dans les professions créatives. Et ça adonne que je suis plutôt d'accord. Le modèle de la compensation à l'heure, pratiquée notamment en communications, n'est pas optimal: une idée qui m'a pris une demi-heure à développer peut avoir des retombées qui valent des milliers de dollars pour mon client.

Lee Clow est un des créateur de 1984, la publicité iconique de Mac. Il s'exprimait dans le cadre du Agency Thought Leader Compensation Summit de la American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Voici le gros de son propos:

For 40 years, I've believed that our business and what we do is to create things. To have ideas, to tell brand stories in an artful way. But somehow every other media artist ... whether they be photographers or filmmakers, directors, people that create TV shows, people who create music, people who perform music ... all of those creative art forms have managed to figure out how to get paid for the value of what they create. Get paid, get residuals, allowed to own what creative idea they have delivered to the world. If it's a bad idea, it will pay very little. But if it's a great idea, it can pay for years and years and years.
Unfortunately, in our business, we get paid like we're doing our clients' laundry. We haven't figured out that the ideas that we create can become a very powerful asset to the brands we work for. Many of the ideas -- whether they be slogans or advertising forms and styles or a voice that we create for brands -- could be listed on the balance sheet of our clients as an asset with millions and millions of dollars in value.
Somehow we've managed to commoditize what we do so that whatever agency gets hired for the lowest price they can negotiate with the purchasing agent gets paid the same as the -- I'd like to say -- better agencies. There are more talented and less talented companies in our business, but somehow that has no role in the compensation formula.
We're supposed to be a creative business, but I think we have been probably the least creative industry in the history of the world in terms of figuring out how to get paid.