Ad Campaigns Sold to the Highest Bidder.

What started out as a joke might end up salvaging tens of thousands of dollars worth of work for Mousetrap Advertising.

Creative Director Dean Fueroghne and others at the small Pasadena shop were sitting at a coffee house griping about the frustrations of putting together campaigns that never see the light of day when the idea came up of auctioning off the unused work on eBay.

"We were kind of kidding about it, but a lot of innovative ideas come out of what started as a joke at first," Fueroghne said.

The joke turned into an experiment for Mousetrap, an unconventional agency where the three partners go by the title "big cheese." Three unused campaigns -- often the result of clients running out of money, going out of business or simply changing their minds -- were recently posted on eBay, each with starting bids of $10,000.

One, a television and billboard campaign Mousetrap created for Patriot Bank Corp., which owns a chain of small community banks in southeastern Pennsylvania, was initially bid up to $25,000. The auction was ongoing last week, and Mousetrap hopes to draw $50,000 to $60,000 for the campaign.

It was hoped that the two other campaigns -- one for a jewelry store and the other for a hospital call-in center -- could draw bids as high as $30,000 each.

The fact that the campaigns would attract bidders at all is surprising, given that they were customized to fit the needs of the clients for which they were created. (While Mousetrap offers to pay for the production work needed to complete the campaign, including inserting the winning, bidder's company into the ads, it would likely appeal to only a handful of small banks.)

Custom work?

"To be honest, we didn't think anybody would bid," Fueroghne said. "It was just a wacky idea."

Selling ready-made campaigns goes against one of advertising's most important principles: creating something that only your client can use.

"It flies in the face of everything you're taught and everything you believe about creating unique selling strategies for your client," said Roger Lavery, dean of the communications school at Northern Arizona University and a former ad executive. "(This) might say something about the quality of the work."

Holly Wolf, Patriot Bank's marketing director, had no problems with the campaign Mousetrap created -- it wasn't implemented for financial reasons. "The timing just wasn't right," she said. "It'll be interesting to see if there's another small community bank that has the same profile and personality that we do that can use it."

Selling, a client's campaign also raises intellectual property issues. Mousetrap was paid by the clients "to research and develop these campaigns, so does the agency have the right to sell them?

Terri Langhans, "big cheese" and client services, director, said that while the clients funded the research and development, they never purchased or implemented them.

Mousetrap stands to make between $65,000 and $130,000 by selling the campaigns, though Fueroghne, also a partner or "big cheese," insisted that money is not the object.

"You've got the work and it's good and it just seemed like a waste. What most agencies do is they'll file' it away and never use it," he said. "These (campaigns) aren't doing anybody any good sitting in a drawer. Somebody needs to own them."