Plagiarism in advertising

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Advertising is under fire.
• As a business, as an industry, as a cultural agent.
• Our relevance and our legitimacy as creators and guardians of the canon and its values is called into question literally 24/7.
• In the age of social media, everything we “create” is scrutinized and torn apart ipso facto by some troll with too much time in his or her hands.
• Everything our creatives come up with seems to be tin-eared, flat-footed or offensive in some way or other.
• Fair enough.
• Question is, do we really “create” in the ad business.
• I think we don’t.
• Advertising simply repurposes and reverse engineers tried & true cultural cues with a commercial purpose.
• We are white gloved plagiarists.
• To be sure, we might have grossly misled ourselves, our clients and our audiences when we defined ourselves as “creatives”.
• Talk about hyperbole.
• We are at best, curators of pop culture.
• Recyclers.
• We basically usurp what already exists and repurpose it to sell something.
• We are opportunists.
• Zeitgeist surfers.
• Oddly enough, there’s an unwritten rule among advertising creatives: copying another ad campaign is considered off-limits.
• That we regard as plagiarism.
• But stealing shamelessly from movies, music or the art world?
• Totally kosher!
• Advertising and commercial graphic design have shamelessly imitated René Magritte, Woody Allen, Seinfeld or Banksy, to name a few, without any intellectual property blowback whatsoever.
• The list is endless.
• How many ad campaigns in the last 15 years have copied scenes from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie Amélie?
• Every Nike ad campaign has clear, if not blatant, cultural references.
• A recent multi award-winning campaign by Spanish agency Lola Mullen Lowe, “Scary Clown” for Burger King could be easily construed by an overeager IP attorney as an evident rip-off of Stephen King’s It.
• Most soundtracks in advertising are thinly veiled covers of old and new hits.
• If Django Reinhardt’s heirs woke up one day and decided to sue unauthorized imitators, they’d spend the next 50 years in court raking in millions.
• Take a look at the documentaries and frequent reports these folks put together: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/
• You won’t believe the level of cultural and artistic errr… cross-pollination… that takes place around us every single day.
• To be continued next week.