Spec creative — creating campaign ideas without a contract — is an unfortunate reality in the advertising world. This usually happens when a company is looking for a new agency to partner with and they would like to see some thinking from potential partners during the pitch process. It also usually ends with one of the agencies being hired and then being paid to complete the campaign ideas they have begun.

Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, entrepreneur, and TV personality on Shark Tank (among other things) wants to see some spec creative ideas for the Mavericks’ uniform design. The difference in the way he is handling this project is there is no possibility for payment. In a post on May 13th on his personal blog, Mark made the call for designs, and his answer to the parameters of the project included:

Who will own your design ? The minute you post it, the Mavs will.  If you think its horrible that the Mavs own your design. Do not post. If you think its cool that the Mavs could possibly use your design and you will have eternal bragging rights, then post away.

Now, within the design community spec creative is already a very hot button subject. Long before this project there were multiple websites and articles campaigning against or just discussing the issues of spec creative. But Mr. Cuban’s project seems to have reinvigorated the discussion. (Just read the comments on his posting directly to see the love and hate about “crowdsourcing” creative ideas.)

I’ll say right away that I did not enter; I already have a job doing design work that pays me in U.S. dollars and enables me to keep the lights on at home. Unfortunately, bragging rights can’t do that. And I don’t follow basketball, so the excitement of designing for the Mavs wasn’t enough to motivate me (if this were for the NFL and the Giants posted the project I might have swallowed my pride and thrown out an idea or two). I also did not write about the project at first because I was generally interested to see the caliber of the design submissions. In his call for designs, Mark Cuban asked people to post their submissions directly in the comments of his blog post so others could see and improve upon what was posted. So not only was he asking people to work for free, but the entire world (or at least the portion of it reading his blog) could take your uniform designs, alter them and win the oh-so-enticing bragging rights.

Mr Cuban stated that he would close the project at the end of May, and in the end there were some people submitting ideas that made me feel better about my talents as a designer, some that were really solid designs, and some that made fun of the project altogether. Now we can just wait to see if he chooses one as their new uniform. Take a look below at a few samples of the submissions or go to the blog post to see them all.