Have you seen this Ad? It's crap.

Was having a read of Sport on the Tube last week and the first ad I saw was this one



Nothing remarkable you say, and you'd be right but then I look over to the companion ad on the right hand side and see this



Which is a total rip-off of this



Image Courtesy

...which I think is genius (the cat ad not the Chevy ad).

I've spoken before about ripping stuff off and whilst perhaps the original doesn't have a huge reach and therefore isn't considered plagiarism by the creatives who steal the idea, if you're going to rip something off at least place it in the right context.

There’s a whole host of things wrong with this, firstly it's just a boring ad with nothing particularly memorable about it but more importantly, the idea of changing the perspective to make something funny/memorable has been totally lost. I don't need to explain it but the reason the cat poster is funny is obvious but the Chevy ad doesn't give the reader anything.

They couldn't put it on a lamppost because nobody loses their car and puts up posters for it and there's no other vehicle for the joke because you need the context of the lamppost to distort else it doesn't really make any sense, you end up just telling the reader to look for this car because it's awesome. As a consumer I'm thinking… Is it awesome? Why? Personally I think it looks like radioactive snot which is pretty low down the awesomeness scale.

I don't have a problem as such with copying ideas but only if you either improve on them or keep them exactly the same and even reference the original piece. As mentioned in my earlier post about this, Car Phone Warehouse did this really well with Kristopher Storm where they loved what he did, got him on board and paid him to do the ads. This is much better and doesn't make your brand look like a total faceless corporate automaton who will just buy themselves ideas instead of actually investing in the talent.