Right after the New Year holidays, letters began appearing in
Manila newspapers (and MEDIA) complaining bitterly about 'copycats' in
the country's advertising industry.
It went on to refer to a couple of our ads as having been lifted from
work that, frankly, we hadn't seen and still haven't been able to
find.
But giving him or her the benefit of the doubt, does the writer of the
letter have a point?
If an ad looks like another ad has one team necessarily ripped off
another?
In a fit of righteous indignation, I decided to take a look at some
local and international examples to see if it was everyone - or just
me.
Well, the good news for me was that after a short time doing this, it
became obvious that just about any ad could, if you tried hard enough,
be tracked down to something else.
As a copywriter from George Paterson Bates (who of course was
complaining bitterly about being accused of ripping something off) wrote
in a 'Dear Sir' letter:
"Is a different use of a product demonstration a rip-off from the first
people that did product demonstrations? Is a visual pun a rip-off from
the person that did the first visual pun? We see the same creative
layouts every day, but judge them on their content, not the fact they
have used the same layout."
Well, quite, as Neil French might say.
And interestingly D&AD juries are not above awarding exactly the same
idea, from different agencies in the same awards show.
Consider these examples: South China Morning Post by J. Walter Thompson
Hong Kong and Hongkong Bank by Ball Singapore.
Or another one on TV - Head & Shoulders by Saatchi & Saatchi London and
another dandruff shampoo by PPGH/JWT, which both used snow-globes to
demonstrate the perils of dandruff.
More recently, the One Show awarded two basically identical posters gold
in the same show (VW Polo by BMP DDB London and Volvo by Saatchi &
Saatchi Madrid).
It's probably fair to say that the juries in these shows saw both ads
and felt each was honestly arrived at.
That was certainly the case at the Singapore Creative Circle.
In this ad, Saatchis Singapore used the idea of over-protective parents
who had apparently taken extreme steps to guarantee the safety of their
kids.
As a group, we felt it deserved to be best of show.
But was it a rip-off from this famous Volvo poster by Abbott Mead
Vickers/BBDO?
I was worried enough to email fellow juror John Messum (now Saatchis
London head of art).
The upshot: yes, there are some similarities.
But it's a good ad by any standards and deserved to win.
So if people aren't ripping each other off, just what, exactly, is going
on?
The answer could be that with tens of thousands of creative teams
toiling away daily at the same problems we are all basically coming up
with the same ideas.
As The Glue Society's Jonathan Kneebone (one of the creators of the
'Feels like Sunday' campaign) put it, "The best ad for me is not one
that fits this weird middle ground territory that everyone around the
world now considers to be 'good ad' territory.
"Look at Archive and you'll notice that it looks like all the work was
done by the same team - it all has the same personality. And it's
boring."
Of course, 'boring' isn't much better than being called a 'rip-off'.
But that's probably the greatest risk in not making your message
brutally and unmistakably specific to the task at hand.
This can be a lot harder than it sounds.
If you are working on a fireworks safety campaign it sounds pretty
specific to use a hand mutilated by gunpowder.
Ace/Saatchi Manila did exactly that and were rewarded with an Ad of the
Year.
As a bizarre coincidence, the same execution showed up in the same year
in this commercial from TBWA Holland.
Same goes for this Lysol ad from McCanns Manila, which cleverly uses a
funeral notice to announce the demise of some germs.
Clearly, they had never seen the same device used a few years ago in
this Shieldtox ad from O&M Malaysia.
This TV commercial for Shell Velocity from JWT Manila looks identical to
an Audi A4 ad from BBH London.
In fact, it's so close you have to say they couldn't have seen the
original - they would at least have changed the car!
Eyebrows might be raised at the Holiday Inn ad from Campaigns & Grey
Manila, which is incredibly similar to this famous Leagas Delaney
example.
And, those eyebrows going yet higher for this, er, tribute by Basic
Advertising Manila to the long-running 'milk moustaches' campaign by
Bozell in the US.
But then again, somebody thought of it before.
Why couldn't someone else sit down and think of it again?
As always, the only test is whether a jury of an awards show
collectively decides to weigh all the factors at hand and decide whether
a new execution adds anything new to the old, however famous.
Eric Silver at Cliff Freeman and partners is quoted as saying:
"Ninety-nine per cent of the time, advertising is necessarily derivative
and only one per cent is truly original. So many ideas have been done
before that most of the time you can't help being unoriginal."
What's the answer then, assuming you do want to reach that magic one per
cent?
The answer seems to lie in making your ads so unique to the brand - and
to the communica-tions problem you're trying to solve - that the chances
of it having been done before are diminished.
The only safe assumption is that everything has been done before.
So perhaps our letter writer was right after all.
We are all copycats, most of the time, and the harder you work the more
you realise it.
All you can hope for is that as the outrageously original (outpost.com,
Fox sports) Silver puts it, that "you steal stuff and make it your
own".
Now there's an idea we can all agree on.
