COPY & PASTE!

I remember having a Lager one evening with a man known to many as Kenya’s hall of fame advertising guru. We were having a chat about all matters advertising when I posed a question to this respected Aussie about how creatives always wail about so and so stealing an idea that was done by so and so. In his wisdom he said that there is nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from an ad campaign, what is wrong is copying and pasting the whole damn thing. This brings me to my point. What stunts are some guys in advertising agency studios trying to pull? Sheesh!

I really laughed a few weeks ago when there was a lot of hullabaloo on a Facebook group which busted an ad agency hands down for clearly cutting and pasting a Red Bull creative idea which they shamelessly placed onto a Stanbic bank piece of creative. I mean guys honestly, how long are we going to sit down and watch creatives earning a whole load of cheddar and agencies over-charging creative time for what I call absolute creative laziness. It was funny at first but when you think of it, this is becoming bloody annoying. Have we run out of ideas? Are we under too much deadline pressure? Are we too stupid to realize that everyone is on the www and plagiarism will easily be spotted?

If you think this nonsense started recently, let me take you down memory lane. Sometime back when the APA awards were all that Kenyan creatives lived for, a certain Asian copywriter raised hell when an agency renowned for scooping all awards got gold for a local Firestone ad. The copywriter did not let this thing go and even went as far as writing to the client and showing him an international Bridgestone ad which was a spitting image of what the agency was awarded for.

Of course the client could care less and did not give three skid marks about the creative war that was erupting. So the client decides to complain about the issue to the Creative Director at his agency. Whoa! The Creative Director was infuriated and went as far as having the CID boys pick up the copywriter at his residence for a little shake down and so ended all the talk and accusations. Fact still remains that the similarity was a bit obvious let alone the ads belonging to the same category.

Then there was the famous Qantascom issue where our green mobile service provider’s creatives were accused of letting the Qantas Commercial kids grow up, giving them a tan and flying them to Kenya to pull the same moves under the close eye of Ridley Scott Associates. Well, turns out that the Creative Director for this project was honest enough to say that he did share the Qantas idea with Mr. Lewa Joseph and the man approved it. Was this an example of plagiarism, well I tend to differ with the critics. Maybe the bigger issue was that guys were trying to connect Australian Creative Director with Australian National carrier.

Talking about airlines, there was a Kenya Airways campaign that received local accolades back in the day. Some of you might remember something to do with red tails. Well another case that caused some anxiety amongst creative folk as something similar had been spotted in an international awards publication.

Oh! And don’t even get me started on the recent Barclays Spice commercial. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

My take is that there is nothing wrong with checking out adsoftheworld and other sites for different directions that one could take in a category. In fact I am an advocate of checking out loads of campaigns but only when you feel your creative juices need a bit of spiking. But for John the Baptists sake, don’t just copy the whole damn thing. Its creative sacrilege and will earn you a big middle finger in the creative hall of shame. How will you gain respect in an industry that is heavily populated with dudes and lasses who take respect as seriously as Bloods and Crips.

To all those who have carved a living out of these creative crimes, shame on you. And no don’t give me that nonsense that there are no original ideas left in the world. If you have the time to research and source a great idea then copy it, I am sure you can find some time to sit with your team and brainstorm something original. Or should I say origanalish?

I will leave you with this quote from that same creative guru I had mentioned in the beginning who after more Lagers admitted this.“The difference between our agency and other agencies is that we copy the good ideas while the others copy the ones that suck.”

Hey, that’s just my opinion.