Be careful when calling ads “rip-offs.”

In the past month, a hand­ful of pop­u­lar indus­try blogs (par­tic­u­larly agencyspy.com) have made a habit of iden­ti­fy­ing adver­tis­ing agen­cies (par­tic­u­larly TBWA/Chiat/Day) it believes “ripped off” var­i­ous movies, music videos or ads. There’s even an entire web­site called Copy©unts ded­i­cated to expos­ing so-called rip-offs. While no work pro­duced by HIGH WIDE & HANDSOME has come into ques­tion, I find the remarks so mis­guided and unfair that I’m com­pelled to offer a counter argument.

Adver­tis­ing is not, as some would con­tend, an orig­i­nal­ity con­test. There should be no debate about whether adver­tis­ing is art or com­merce: it is, with­out ques­tion, art in the inter­est of com­merce. We are not film­mak­ers. We are not painters. We are not poets. We are rela­tion­ship builders who are paid to con­nect brands and consumers—not to ful­fill our indi­vid­ual cre­ative ambi­tions.

Orig­i­nal­ity can, and often does, elicit a pos­i­tive response from con­sumers. But just as a come­dian doing an imper­son­ation or a coworker recit­ing a line from a movie can be endear­ing, so, too, can repur­pos­ing pop­u­lar cul­ture as part of a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Isn’t the rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of famil­iar con­tent the foun­da­tion of Inter­net memes?

Fur­ther­more, the “rip-off” accu­sa­tion neg­li­gently over­looks the tal­ent required to rec­og­nize some­thing in a movie or music video that has a mar­ket­ing application—not to men­tion the abil­ity to exe­cute the rein­ter­pre­ta­tion suc­cess­fully. (Just look at how many movie remakes have failed at the box office.) If an ad is well exe­cuted, well received and accom­plishes a busi­ness objec­tive, lam­bast­ing it for being deriv­a­tive is noth­ing short of igno­rant (and typ­i­cally a sign of jeal­ousy). I don’t care if the idea was taken from a music video; the fact that this Pedi­gree com­mer­cial has gar­nered sev­eral mil­lion views on YouTube in just a few weeks qual­i­fies it as beyond reproach.







And while this famous “Cog” spot for Honda is clearly a “rip-off” of the artist Rube Gold­berg, it is unde­ni­ably suc­cess­ful at telling a brand story in a way that can’t be ignored.







Hip-hop is per­haps the best exam­ple of the tal­ent nec­es­sary to suc­cess­fully repur­pose exist­ing cre­ative ele­ments. If sam­pling an old song were an easy way to make a hit record, there would be a new plat­inum album every hour. But only a hand­ful of pro­duc­ers have the skills needed to iden­tify a sample-worthy clas­sic and turn it into a modern-day chart-topper.

Over the years, count­less for­lorn cre­ative teams have come to me to explain that they had dis­cov­ered a campaign—produced in a small for­eign coun­try sev­eral years earlier—bearing a resem­blance to work we were prepar­ing to show a client. In each case, my response was the same: it doesn’t mat­ter. Yes, it’s a blow to your ego; yes, it could be a blow to your port­fo­lio; but it doesn’t change whether or not the work will be effec­tive. (Unless, of course, the tar­get audi­ence includes heavy read­ers of inter­na­tional adver­tis­ing award show programs.)

So, please, blog­gers, stop throw­ing around naïve accu­sa­tions of pla­gia­rism and focus your cri­tiques on whether or not the work is effective­. In the end, that’s the only thing that mat­ters. And I’m pretty sure I stole that phi­los­o­phy from a lot of cre­ative direc­tors who came before me.