Plagiarism in advertising
June 19, 2018
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.