Omnicom Group shifts economic burden to photographers and producers
Just recently the Omnicom Group- the world’s largest advertising agency holding company- has decided that it will no longer be held responsible as financier for print and motion productions in advertising and the burden to pay for productions will shift to photographers and producers.
This is major. Many productions cost tens of thousands of dollars and occaisionally hundreds of thousands of dollars. This new policy would mean that the advertising agency would require a photographer like myself to put up all of the money myself for a production (who has a $100,000 in cash lying around?) and the burden of collecting that money would be entirely upon the photographer or producer who financed the production. This will affect not only photographers, producers and directors but the production crews that depend on them- designers, copywriters and anyone else involved in a commercial production. According to U.S. bankruptcy laws, a client (the advertiser) who has filed for bankruptcy must pay their financial commitments in the order of the size of the amount they owe. For some companies who owe millions (or billions) this means that an outstanding invoice to a photographer or design firm of $200,000 could take months or years to pay off, or they could just opt out of paying it altogether. I personally don’t know anyone who can take a hit like that and remain in business. Furthermore, this also means that it will be almost impossible for young/new photographers and other commercial artists to get into the business unless they already have a significant amount of money on hand.
This is bad news. Spread the word.
Update: I’ve spoken with someone at BBDO today who told me that while it’s not exactly true that they won’t pay advances, it is true that they can’t pay unless the advertiser/client has paid. This person told me that the people at the agencies themselves are just becoming aware of this situation and are looking to see how to work with this new clause without it affecting production or payment.
