BBH charges Ogilvy with Barnado copy

SINGAPORE: Bartle Bogle & Hegarty has charged that Ogilvy & Mather's pro bono campaign for the Singapore National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) is similar to work its London office created for UK welfare agency, Barnado, last year. Both campaigns juxtapose the appalling living conditions drug addicts endure with images of addicts when they were kids. Steve Elrick, creative director at BBH, said: "The O&M campaign is not only similar, it uses the same idea, same style and covers a similar topic to a BBH campaign that ran not that long ago and generated publicity in Singapore." BBH's campaign caused a furore in the British parliament because one execution featured a digitally-altered image of a baby, sitting on the floor of a squat, shooting up heroin. It also made headlines in Singapore when the daily tabloid The New Paper had the ad on its front page. O&M executive creative director, Andy Greenaway, however, rejected the charge. Instead, he issued a counter-charge, saying BBH had itself used a creative idea similar to a 1970s anti-smoking ad created by Saatchi & Saatchi London.Greenaway agreed that both campaigns used the same idea, but insisted that the creative executions are very different. Any similarities between the two campaigns, he said, are coin- cidental. He insisted that O&M had no intention of taking ideas from BBH. Greenaway believes the situation may have occurred because the campaigns follow a similar strategy, and he pointed to numerous instances where creatives in different countries have accidentally come up with the same idea. Creative directors in Singapore agencies have also remarked on the similarities between the two campaigns. But Chris Kyme, FCB region-al creative director, said: "However, knowing O&M here I very much doubt they would rip something off."

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