You know when you’re in town, or in the supermarket, or at bingo, you know anywhere with a high quantity of old women, you see them with their big carrier bags. They’ve got strong handles, the sort of bag you will actually exchange money for, they’ve got patterns and pictures on them, and emblazoned across them is the motto of the biddies that carry them: BAG FOR LIFE. I can't help but think to myself "You certainly are, love. You certainly are."
Anyone seen that advert for Senokot constipation cure? It's essentially a demo ad, but it is an incredibly scary one that has me crossing every part of my body that I'll never get constipated. There’s a woman with a big handbag and it goes “imagine this bag is your stomach, over the day it’s getting full of food” and so on, and this woman’s carrying around this big handbag full of food and other crap representing her constipated stomach.
And then it goes on to advertise the magical cure they’re selling and that you’ll be free of constipation: seems straight forward so far. The thing is, to demonstrate how it works, the woman gets the bag, the bag that’s full to the brim with food, and tips it upside down into the bin!
Imagine that was your stomach! WHUMP! There ya go! All your fucking stomach contents BANG, straight out of your arse. You better be near a toilet when you take these tablets cause you’re gonna lose a fucking kidney! I couldn’t believe it. I’d rather be a big bag full of food than have the entire contents of my stomach leave my body in under a second. Fuck that!
I love the internet. I've spent so much time on the internet that after a lifetime of perfect vision I have rather prematurely started to need glasses to see properly. Admittedly I'm not too cut up about it because I now look more like a planner than I used to, and have seriously increased gravitas, particularly when I remove them as I unleash a powerful insight. Or at least that's how it looks when I practise in front of the mirror.
Where I was going with this whole internet thing, though, is that it is seriously hindering creativity in the advertising industry. Not through any fault of its own, mostly because some lacklustre creatives are using it for ideas, instead of actually having their own. What used to be an exercise of cracking a brief to bring a brand alive has now turned into an exercise of finding the best way to crowbar that cool thing they saw on the internet into their upcoming campaign.
Yes, stealing off the internet is the new in thing! It's fast, it's exciting and it's a piece of fucking piss. Thankfully, the majority of the unwashed masses don't spend so much time online and they haven't seen the latest viral, cool video or funny image that has been sent around, so when you present it to them as an ad campaign they'll happily lap it up and think whoever created it must be a fucking genius. For the geekier among us, who have reached the end of the internet several times, it is painful to watch and painful to hear people talking about. It's mostly bad because when someone is harping on about an obvious internet steal, there's really no way to answer truthfully without coming across as a cock:
"Yeah, but they stole the idea off the internet"
"I saw that online 3 years ago"
"Do you not go online?!"
And so on and so forth.
Now, I present to you my 3 worst offenders for internet thievery:
At number 3, it's Berocca:
Which is a direct steal from this song by OK Go, which became much more of a hit online than it ever was in the charts, due entirely to its superbly awesome video:
There are a few reasons why this one is quite so painful: the first being simply that it's so obviously a rip, down to the number of treadmills and the moves they are doing. At least if you're going to steal an idea try and make it your own, this ad is more like a cover-version than a tribute. If they'd used the OK Go music it might not have seemed so cheeky, and would instead have been a little nod of the cap. Actually, who am I kidding, that'd still be fucking rude.
The second thing is that it really doesn't have anything to do with the product - You on a good day? What the fuck has that got to do with twatting around on a few treadmills in the middle of the street? That's not me on a good day! On a good day I sit around the flat in my pants drinking beer and watching Red Dwarf repeats on Dave. If I found myself in a busy square, wearing a suit and skiing on a treadmill in front of bewildered onlookers I would consider myself to be having a very bad day!
Next on my list of outright thievery is Saatchi & Saatchi's much loved T-Mobile advert where they had the extremely original idea of doing a flash mob, because someone heard that flash mobs were really cool (about 5 years ago).
I have to admit, I love the execution - they did a really good job of executing a truly unoriginal idea - because it is a well done flash mob, it's funny, it took people by surprise, and it created a lot of buzz for the agency and the brand. Apparently, it also worked incredibly well as an advert, and the weekend after it ran T-Mobile enjoyed the most visits to their stores they'd ever had on a Saturday.
What I do not love, though, is that they clearly just had an idea they really wanted to do and so they crowbarred it into the brand's current campaign as awkwardly as possible just so they could justify doing it. The brand's current slogan is of course "Life's for sharing" which apparently ties into this flash mob because some people there were filming it on their mobiles, phoning their friends and sending texts to talk about it. Apparently.
They weren't sharing life, they were probably ringing their boss to apologise that they'd be late for their meeting because a bunch of muppets were blocking the way to the platform and they'd missed their train! Yes, life is for sharing, and apparently really old ideas that took off on the internet are for sharing, though whether or not they'll be sharing any of the credit is even more questionable than the idea that none of the "members of the public" on their phones were stooges.
And third on my list has to be this BBC6 advert:
Really cool, eh? But not quite as cool as the original, which was not only better executed, but also had that little thing that originals tend to have that elevates them above copies: Originality
"6 music...Get an earful"...An earful of what? Guilt? Unoriginality? Chlamydia? Should a youth radio station not be trying to be original, fresh and exciting instead of copying something they found on the internet and doing a half arsed job of it.
Now, I've singled these 3 out but there are countless others out there and I'm worried that it's becoming far too much of a trend among younger creatives (or maybe they're older and lazier, but it seems more likely that it'll be the young internetty types). It seems far too many are seeing cool, funny, original, innovative ideas on the internet and instead of thinking "wow, I wish I could do something as cool as that, I'm going to try really hard to be that creative" they think "I bet no one at the office has seen this yet, and the client definitely won't have. They'll think I'm well fucking creative if I present this to them."
STOP IT!! YOU'RE NOT FUCKING CREATIVE!! IF YOU ARE COPYING AN IDEA YOU SAW ON THE INTERNET YOU ARE A FRAUD AND YOUR PARENTS WOULD BE SPINNING IN THEIR GRAVES IF THEY KNEW. IF YOUR PARENTS AREN'T DEAD THEY WOULD DIE OF SHAME IF THEY WERE EVER TO FIND OUT!
Thankfully none of the creatives I work with have felt the need to steal creative ideas off the internet yet, because they are all very talented and original thinkers. Also, if they even so much as try to present an idea from the internet to me, I will publicly depants them as the unoriginal bastards they would be. They wouldn't stand a chance, because I've seen so much of the internet that I was bored enough to actually sit here and write some more internet so that I would have something else to read next time I go on the internet.
Edit: Just watching TV and I saw another rip of the original living graffiti: this one REALLY has nothing to do with it, they obviously just wanted to use the cool idea for something - ANYTHING. These thieves know no bounds.
