All I want is a fucking banner

A while back I wrote about how easy it can be for a marketing department to lose sight of its cost/benefit picture when outsourcing creative services to third parties. I realized only just today that there’s a troublesomely fuzzy boundary between invention and execution that can result in paying more than you have to for the latter. Invention is justifiably more expensive than execution. It bills at a higher rate. So anyone whom you allow to bill you for any amount of invention will try to put as much of it on the invoice as they think they can get away with. Of course, occasionally, what you need is invention, and that’s what you should seek out. When you happen to engage a vendor that provides both invention and execution, it can make a lot of sense to accept both. But what you want to be sure to avoid is the provider of execution services who is aspiring to invention. What you want to do with such a person is hire them.