It doesn’t matter if you’re a skilled creative looking to launch a media, marketing, or advertising agency for the first time or someone with years of experience under your belt. It’s always good to keep up to date with the latest and most relevant legal documents for your agency.
At Lawpath, we know the challenges that creative professionals face when starting out, especially when it comes to understanding the right legal documents for your media agency. Understanding which ones make sense and which don’t is what we do to help you. That’s why we’ve put a consolidated list together to help you understand exactly what your business needs!
Read along!
Why legal documents for your media agency?
Taking care of your business legals and ensuring that you have the right legal documents for your media agency from the very beginning is a foundational step and has various benefits:
Prevents your business
Legal documents clearly define the rights and obligations of both your business and your clients. If you want to safeguard against any legal issues in the future, having a robust set of legal documents that cover a variety of different legal issues, ready to go is critical for your protection.
You don’t want to be found negligent or do something illegal that could have been easily avoided if you simply had the correct legal documents in place.
Safeguards your position
Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law enforces that a business must not engage in misleading or deceptive conduct. Section 29 furthers the scope of this by including false representations within social media marketing campaigns.
As a media or digital marketing agency, you do not technically make the representations, but you become an accessory which means the consequences remain the same as per these regulatory sections.
There are various consequences for a contravention of the Australian Consumer Law. These can be particularly harsh and could include:
- A fine of up to $10,000,000
- A fine of up to three times the value of the benefit received
- 10% of annual turnover in the preceding 12 months, if a court cannot determine the benefit obtained from the offence
Relevant Legal Documents for you Media Agency
Now that you’ve glanced through the benefits of legal documents for your media, marketing, or advertising agency, let’s glance through the key documents that you’ll need when starting out and beyond.
Terms and Conditions
As a business, you would have a set of terms and conditions that would be relevant to all clients you serve. This can be for goods or services. Here, you can outline agency services in terms of what you do and how you do it. This can include how you deal with social media posting (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin), what topics are off limits, and if there are any limitations on your liability. This makes it clear to your clients what they can expect when they employ your agency.
Employment Agreement and Contract
Within the employment agreement or contract, the scope of the services and the deliverables should be defined as well as the schedule for delivery of the work. Essentially, this document is describing what service you are providing and in what time frame. This is different from client to client and is where the marketing strategy is outlined. This is a critical part of running any business as it clearly sets expectations.
In addition, within the employment agreement, a term can set out the standard for whether or not press releases are an appropriate task given the job at hand.
Subcontracting
If your agency often subcontracts out parts of their work for optimisation purposes, for example, outsourcing posting on a client’s social media account, you would first need consent from the client that this practice is acceptable. Some clients may not want you to subcontract, therefore when forming the contract, a clear term stating this is necessary.
Exclusivity
During the course of a marketing arrangement, it needs to be clearly defined whether or not you will be the exclusive provider of marketing services. Clients may have a variety of different media or advertising agencies doing different jobs. Depending on the job, it is a good idea to consider an exclusivity document to ensure you have full control of marketing activities to avoid being blamed for a lackluster performance that had nothing to do with you.
Confidentiality
In today’s day and age, privacy, confidential information, and non-disclosure agreements are so important not just for clients but for everyone. As a media agency, it would be prudent to have a document in place that outlines what is appropriate information to share and when.
Payment
As with any business, a document outlining payment is necessary to ensure monetary expectations are met.
Invoice and Audits
Building upon payments, invoices, and audits that clearly outline how much money was spent on a campaign and where it went, for example, ad spends in digital or overall media advertising. Similarly, if your pay is determined by performance, these documents are key in calculating what you have earned.
Intellectual Property Rights
Given your media agency will produce content for a client, intellectual property and its subsequent rights are important to distinguish while working on a job. Clients will usually want to own any intellectual property your marketing firm creates. So, if you would like to keep the rights for any reason, it should be clearly stated when negotiating the intellectual property agreement.
On the other hand, a client may require you to use something like their logo or company name. This is their intellectual property and you would need the approval to use it within your campaigns.
Termination
Things happen, and sometimes you or your client may want to end your agreement early. This is why a termination document that clearly outlines what is and isn’t acceptable in the circumstances is a good idea so you can go your separate ways smoothly.
Disputes
In the unlikely event of any issues, it is good to have a dispute resolution document in place to act as a guideline to resolution processes. There are always dispute resolution options available to you, but it is best to have clauses in place so the process can run smoothly.
Privacy Policy
If your agency is run online or is an online business, you will need to have a clear privacy policy that is in place so users know what data is being collected. this is important if you are undertaking email marketing and gathering emails from your website.
Website Terms of Use
This outlines how people can use your e-commerce website and any relevant disclaimers. Website terms and conditions is essentially the fine print that you need to have so your website users know what they can and can’t do with the website’s information.
Key Takeaways
When taking on a new client or partnership there are so many factors to consider!
This is why a clear legal contract that incorporates and outlines all these documents is critical to a successful client relationship. This means you can work together seamlessly and avoid any unwanted conflict.
Lawpath has a growing library of over 350+ legal documents for businesses both big and small and you can access all these documents easily.
We get it that navigating all of these can sometimes be tricky and that’s why we’ve made it easy for you to can hire an expert lawyer to help you with any of your marketing agency’s legal needs.
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