Vox youtube plagarism6/11/2023 ![]() Ajay is far too much a gentleman to ever allow something like this. Someone from the brand team must not even have told Ajay Bijli that they were copying a foreign ad. After all, all that happened in the recent Vivo-O&M showdown was but a bit of hullabaloo and then a surreptitious ‘compromise’. A general belief that no one knows better. So, if I hadn’t seen the original stuff and mentioned it occasionally in my columns, the originality of the Zoo-Zoos would have remained an Ogilvy credit. Not many in India would even know of its existence. Since I was a frequent visitor to Japan those days, and the Dentsu JV partner in India, I got to see the original Japanese campaign during one of my trips. So also with the famous Zoo-Zoos of Vodafone that have won many accolades for O&M India over the years … clearly replicated from the Docomodake campaign of Dentsu in the mid 2000s where a family of mushrooms were used to sell VAS services for NTT. The logo of the Make in India initiative was a pure and simple copy of a Cantonal Bank of Zurich campaign though the client, Amitabh Kant, refused to accept it was an inspired ‘lift’. But it must really be embarrassing for a well-respected, listed entity to be so publicly ridiculed. The PVR ad has not gone as far as being entered for awards … these days you get caught almost instantly. ![]() McCann Erickson’s Grand Prix winning Active Total ad too was found to be very similar to an ad for Moi GPS magazine created by Bates Shanghai. That GoaFest saw much chaos but was a watershed event atleast as far as plagiarism was concerned. Mudra too were defrocked for an Electrolux ad that was similar to a Y&R Brazil LG washing machines ad. The BBDO India DHL ad was stripped of two golds and a silver Abby for being a copy of O&M HongKong’s Allied Pickfords 2011 campaign. The first time in recent times that clients and agencies were actually caught out, shamed and stigmatised somewhat was at the GoaFest in 2013. The internet has not only made ‘search’ and ‘share’ easier amongst users, but the proliferation of industry websites and brand-focussed media has created a whole tribe of vigilantes, who cry foul, wave a red flag, and then raise a shindig on Twitter and social media. Then there would be the usual insinuations, the accusations, some mud-slinging … and then it would all be conveniently forgotten, if not forgiven. And the only way you would get caught for a ‘copy’ was if the original got featured in a ‘Black Book’ all art directors used to venerate as the Bible of creative till a few years ago. I know of Creative Directors who in the mid 90s would go to Cannes every year only to be ‘inspired’. Chances of the ‘copy’ being caught were minimal. And in the old days you could get away with it. A client/creative guy would see a nice ad or a nice design overseas. Especially when you think no one is watching! This has been the constant malaise in advertising (and in other creative businesses too!). And a really good idea is difficult to resist. The answer to that is simple: the temptation to steal is a human weakness. In the case of PVR, the ad is a frame-by-frame copy of VOX … and the addition of clever supers and a creative rounding up at the end through another super cannot disguise the blatant copy. There are many examples of ads looking similar, purely by coincidence … but they are usually from different product categories and you have to really look for the similarities … usually the commonality of a creative idea but most times rendered somewhat differently. Of course, the PVR client has sought to distance the brand from the brewing controversy but no amount of denials can negate the reality: the commercial is unwittingly plagiarized and no excuse can be proffered to the contrary. The PVR film, “Every seat holds a story” which released earlier in the week, even to the untrained eye, seems a frame-by-frame copy of the VOX commercial … no doubt on that at all. Yesterday, the ET Brand Equity ran a lead piece on PVR’s ‘inspired’ brand film comparing its content to a commercial released a couple of years ago by VOX Cinemas in the Middle East.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |