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This is an extremely weird exchange... I would interpret her tweet as, Coinbase contracted her team, they pitched ideas, they rejected the ideas, then "stole" i
by 015a 5y ago
This is an extremely weird exchange... I would interpret her tweet as, Coinbase contracted her team, they pitched ideas, they rejected the ideas, then "stole" it and developed it internally. But his later reply suggests that, no, they were partners through to the end.
It does seem like he was intentionally or unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it, but frankly I'm not sure that's a big enough misstep to warrant the marketing company replying like that trying to "out" him. In my eyes, that's an extremely unprofessional move on their part.
We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us". That just straight up never, never, never happens; we take responsibility for both the success and failures of our contractors. Of course, success is always nice, and when directly asked we don't hide it (on the contrary; we're happy to give them some free word-of-mouth marketing if they've done good work). There's an alternate reality here where the marketing firm maybe reaches out privately and says "hey Brian; your tweets really paint a picture that we had nothing to do with it; mind giving us a shout-out?"
But that's not the direction they went, and instead they just aired dirty laundry in a public forum. Actually, its not even dirty laundry?! Its just laundry. I can say with absolute certainty that if any contractors/third parties pulled this stunt with us, we'd never use them again, period. Beyond anything else, NDAs are SOP in exchanges like this, I'd bet my life savings she absentmindedly signed one; to throw out a tweet like that isn't just unprofessional, its potentially litigable.
- beaconstudios 5y ago> It does seem like he was intentionally or unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it That's a lot of fancy words to say "he lied". I can understand the sentiment if he was just waxing lyrical about the ad, but he explicitly said "no ad agency would come up with this".
- hitekker 5y agoYeah, word salad is a good smell for self-deception.
- mepiethree 5y ago> unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it 0% chance it was unintentional given that he said “no ad agency would have done this ad” Her tweet gets her firm attention from people who may believe that Coinbase is bad/run by men who want to take credit for other peoples’ work, which is probably… a lot of people. Her tweet is probably good for business. No way it gets litigated or that they win, given that other people at Coinbase publicly gave her credit even before she Tweeted
- pdpi 5y ago> We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us" But do you ever tell your customers "We used no contractors for this work. No contractor would ever have had the ideas our internal team came up with" when there were, in fact, contractors involved in the conception and design of the project?
- mint2 5y agoIn the tweet he literally said “no ad agency would do this ad”. Your example for your company and contract is not nearly the same. If you tell your customers and investors that no contractors could come up with your new feature that contractors actually came up with then it would match and it would sound like a fraudulent representation of the company’s teams work.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoIn advertising, they give out awards to agencies for making the best ad. The ad is somewhat also an ad for the agency. It’s like paying someone to write your biography, then claiming you wrote it yourself and turning the author into a ghostwriter (without their agreement). You shouldn’t expect the author to let you get away with that. If the work doesn’t go in their portfolio, you need to pay extra.
- technion 5y agoI'm not sure the analogy holds. When you hire engineering contractors, you typically pay them for the work. You don't get them to a pitch a fix on a whiteboard, tell them "no we don't like that, we won't proceed with you and you can leave now" and then have your own people do that fix. Which is my reading of what's alleged here.
- notahacker 5y agoI'm sure Armstrong would have posted the shout out in the alternate reality in which the agency privately and professionally requested it, but I prefer the reality where he looks like an absolute tit that got shamed into doing it. Not because I care about crediting creative agencies, but because of the cheesy LinkedIn-style fake story about how much they'd achieved by rejecting unimaginative agencies, when actually they commissioned an agency which come up with the core idea and all the implementation. Nothing wrong with not naming your contractors until you start telling marketing stories about how you didn't use any because they couldn't possibly achieve what you achieved in house! Sure, it wasn't professional to call it out, but that doesn't mean it didn't deserve it