The real cost of ignoring ownership of digital assets

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Nobody bills you for neglecting ownership of digital assets. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Domains and accounts should be registered to you
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A reasonable first step

Get it in writing before work starts. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Get it in writing before work starts — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.