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A few weeks ago, one of my friends “liked” a really great photograph on Facebook—one with no credit—of a dog yawning as a man poured a cup of coffee next to him. I really wanted to buy a print of it. A few hours later, I saw the same image on Instagram, undoubtedly cropped, filtered and again, not credited. Such is the Internet.

Eventually, I found the original photographer, Theron Humphrey. In his own Facebook photo album, Humphrey had shared posts created by at least two major businesses that used his image without permission or attribution, one of which had even Photoshopped their own commercial product into the image.

Rather than a lawsuit, Humphrey instead took to Twitter and asked his followers to help him persuade the company to make a donation to an animal shelter, which they did after apologizing for using the photograph. Sound familiar?

It’s important for businesses to understand that reposting or reblogging images on social media on their own page still qualifies as advertising. If you’re not directly reposting from the original source with a link back, you should be buying a commercial license to use that image.

Links, copyright and credit are crucially important in social media, especially with regard to business accounts. It’s something we take seriously at T3, where I serve as the Art Buyer and Digital Asset Manager. Let me share a few tips on how you can avoid copyright infringement:

• Know the law when it comes to copyright, especially as it applies to advertising and social media.

• Don’t just take anything from the Internet. Know when and how to obtain a license and abide by the terms you negotiate.

• Read and understand the terms of use for the social platforms you’re using regarding any images or content you plan to use.

• If you’re not sure, ask. Consult an art buyer or copyright expert.

• Take advantage of digital asset management software and metadata to document usage rights and store licenses for all your social content, including images, videos, audio and talent releases.

T3 spends a lot of time creating original content for our clients’ social media accounts and managing usage rights needed to post all of the content sourced outside our agency.

As new technologies arrive, copyright infringement issues rise in importance. The smart approach is to work with a creative agency that understands intellectual property laws and helps clients create a consistent visual approach that best represents their brand.

Jessica Hutson, T3 social media manager, contributed to this blog post.

I should listen to Steven Johnson more. Perhaps there’s a reason all this talk of innovation makes me twitch a little. Johnson urges us to listen to the slow hunch and focus on unraveling that instead of chasing light-bulb moments. In other words, trust your gut—if you can’t get it out of your mind, you’re probably onto something.

Johnson was one of many great minds at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Forum. This event didn’t actually celebrate achievements, it celebrated how to help people achieve (I knew I was onto something a few months ago). Ultimately, it’s less about creating a “department of innovation,” than it is about having the bravery and leadership to make the sometimes unpopular investments and trade-offs that allow people to see those innovations through.

Cultivating true innovation.
True innovation is cultivated in environments that genuinely energize people. Think about what that means. What we heard was that those environments include a common goal that matters, a philosophically unified team of shared values, access to people from diverse backgrounds, the security to fail and regroup, a physical space that doesn’t feel oppressive and so forth.

Humans are programmed to be risk-averse; it is a survival trait. Robert Tucker says this individual trait naturally adds up in an organizational structure. We need to go out of our way to create safe and stimulating environments for real potential to break through—both physically and psychologically.

Johnson asked why the coffee house in past centuries was so generative to ideas versus colleges. It was perhaps due to the caffeine (seriously!), but importantly, it was about multidisciplinary space where there was a tremendous flow of ideas.

The collisions between these different fields is important. Juxtapose coffee houses with the typical conference room, where many ideas essentially go to die. And death of an idea is OK, provided that it doesn’t also extinguish the pursuit of better or take a human sacrifice along with it…as is so common in today’s corporate environments. In fact, Google’s Laszlo Bock went as far as to say that smart people in organizations rarely experience failure, which leads to them shutting down their capacity to learn. What a terrible waste that is.

Innovation demands risk.
VM Ware’s Pat Gelsinger noted that—as opposed to an investment mentality—most organizational DNA is built around optimization, or squeezing more and more efficiency out of its assets, which inherently runs counter to all this. And Bock reminded us about the plethora of research substantiating the fact that as soon as you start bringing up extrinsic rewards, motivation declines. What businesses have largely created is a model that stifles innovation and nudges people to continue milking the cow by offering up cash, titles and awards as incentives. What is bound to happen?

At one point in the conference, a person working at a nonprofit asked how to take risks in a philanthropically funded culture that doesn’t tolerate failure. The answer was as remarkable as it was encouraging. If we just look at the crowd-funding phenomenon (approximately $15 billion in 2015 by some accounts), it reveals a world asking us to take bigger risks. Companies may not want you to take risks, but people will back you up as you take that shot.

As it turns out, we are only in the ideas business—and able to make a real impact on our clients’ business—if we can truly be in service of the people we employ. Maybe soon, we’ll only be in business if we are able to do just that.

By now you’ve likely heard about the new TV spot by Hyundai. It’s getting a ton of buzz in the social world and is being tagged as the “suicide ad.”

Launched last week in the UK, Hyundai has since pulled the ad and apologized due to the eruption of criticism that quickly followed its release.

Criticism that’s 110% justified, IMO.

The ad is shocking. Insensitive. Disgusting. Infuriating. And I can’t believe a brand would ever put its stamp on something like this.

Nevertheless, I’ve passed it around to a few friends at the office and their reactions have surprised me, ranging from “Whoa” and “WHAT?!?!”  to “That’s pretty funny” and “Brilliant.” Really?

The TV spot starts off showing a man in his garage at home, clearly taping up his car’s exhaust pipes. The garage door is shut. Enter slow, dramatic music.

The man is then shown sitting in his car—windows up, car running, exhaust fumes pumping out. He looks nervous. And sad. So sad. You can see the pain in his teary, empty eyes. He sighs. And swallows hard. Then his eyes shut.

The camera pulls away to show the outside of his home. There’s a flash of light in the garage. The music stops, and we assume the man has just killed himself via carbon monoxide poisoning.

But then the man lifts up the garage door. Fumes are still swirling inside. He’s alive. A headline appears, introducing a new Hyundai model with “100% water emissions”. The man calmly walks away.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When I first watched the spot, I didn’t know whether to start sobbing or just scream at my computer. And now I’m just plain pissed.

Shame on you, Hyundai. How dare you play with my emotions like that. How dare you use such a delicate and emotionally charged subject like suicide to introduce your innovation. Seriously? You think this is funny?

Don’t give me the whole “No press is bad press” line. For me, this ad crosses the line.

In a world where brands sometimes resort to shock value to gain attention, this is one case where they simply went too far. UGH.

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