The early June eBay spot, developed by Ogilvy & Mather, features a man who earns the wrath of his wife after their vase is broken. He saves the day by finding a replacement on eBay.
However, his luck is short-lived. As the couple celebrate their find with champagne, the cork that pops out of the bottle hits and breaks the new vase.
The Yahoo-Kimo TV campaign continues the story, with the man wandering the streets after being kicked out of the house by his wife.
In order to return home, he goes online again and finds dozens of the same vase but, this time, at Yahoo-Kimo.
Yahoo-Kimo - which has an 80 per cent share of the online auctions market in Taiwan, compared with eBay's 10 per cent - used different actors to play the couple but copied the style and mood of the original eBay campaign.
Brand consultants were puzzled as to why the market leader chose to copy the creative of the challenger brand instead of creating a campaign that was intrinsically tied to its image.
Colin Bates, Brandstorm brand consultant, said that Yahoo could be trying to defend itself because eBay is a bigger entity on the world stage.
"In a way, you could say that Yahoo is defending itself and may not perceive itself to be the brand leader because of eBay's dominant position in the global market," he said.
However, Anita Huang, Yahoo-Kimo Taiwan country manager, said: "We simply wanted to add more humour. The wife is even more sarcastic and the husband even more desperate," she said.
Huang admitted the idea, which was developed in-house, was risky but she stressed that the campaign was not rushed to air and that there was a "focus on quality and humour".
O&M, which developed the eBay ads, said it was flattered that its work had been copied. Stephen Mangham, Ogilvy Taiwan managing director, said: "It's almost like an act of homage."
However, he said that eBay was not likely to react to Yahoo-Kimo's ad and that it would continue with its campaign, which includes three TVCs and six print ads.
"It would seem that the Yahoo-Kimo campaign is reminding people about eBay," Mangham said.
He was referring to a survey commissioned by local marketing magazine, Brain, which found that 65 per cent of respondents felt the Yahoo-Kimo ad was also promoting the eBay brand.
"When people go online, they will recall seeing a television commercial which said something about online auctions," said Huang.
"They probably saw eBay's ad first, but because we've continued the storyline, the first place they will likely visit will be Yahoo-Kimo."
Additional reporting by Alfred Hille.