I'm a salaried in house photo-video guy for a marketing agency. I recently asked about the idea of selling landscape prints at art markets or just selling photo / video services that are outside the scope of business marketing. Like senior portraits, weddings, landscape prints etc. Services the company doesn't even offer. Just some light weekend work for a little extra income. Something fun to do, to keep learning and being creative on my own terms and time.
When I asked about it to avoid any conflict of interest the answer to it was met with "if you use company equipment we'd ask for a percentage of your sales." "okayyy, I sort of get that, well if i just update my camera and use my own equipment then? No company resources at all. Cool?" "How can you prove you didn't use our stuff? We'll have to talk about this more." There was more and the gist of that was basically "we pay you a salary so you don't have to do that stuff."
Personally I feel like building a following and an audience would only be beneficial to the company but I feel more like secret property now after that conversion and it's making me a little frustrated. Anyone else who is salaried with a company able to do side work, market themselves, sell prints, have a website etc? How should that work?
I'm currently in a position but leaving on 15th December.
I was allowed to market myself for anything that wasn't a conflict of interest. So the agency did corporate work - headshots, interiors, Events, some lifestyle and campaigns.
I was once under the impression that I could market to small and one-person businesses, but I was slapped over the knuckles as that was apparently still a conflict of interest, even though those businesses could never afford the big brand rates of this agency.
I'm in the UK and by my contract, no additional commercial work can be undertaken while under contract. But they had graces on that. Weddings were fine as well as a bunch of other avenues such as if I sold my prints. That literally isn't their business.
So I stuck to weddings and I could market that as much as I liked. I still did the odd other shoot and even got referred by the boss for one! But those were word-of-mouth things I could keep on the down low. And I always used my own kit. That's pretty important, tbh. They'd have no copyright claim or anything but you taking the risk of damaging it off work time.
However, marketing the weddings led me to hand my notice in. So it still worked out!