FEATURES: It's a coincidence, Jim, but not as we know it - If one ad looks just like another ad, was it necessarily ripped off?

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.

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