Damn dem ad people! They never have an original idea. They just steal stuff from awards books or from their own agency portfolios. Ripping art directors, hack writers and total losers. How can we find the real ideas?Today I received a pair of ads from a friend in the biz here in Vietnam, and he's passing me some local industry gossip from some Viet boys/girls who think that one agency ripped it's own ads and made another ad. Let's take a look - ad busters that you think you all are, and see what we have.
Ha. What we have here is rubbish. Rubbish on two fronts. Exhibit "A" is for a client called Milex. It's a milk powder that will make your average Vietnamese kid a genius. Not. The agency should be a respected multinational but with this rubbish, that should come seriously into question. Let's not talk about this ad. It suks big time. Somebody, please fire the creative director.
Exhibit "B" is an ad for, 'Oh my Gwad', VNPT. A telephone company. It suks too. So let me get this straight? People in the ad business think that this one ad steals the other ad because they both suk? Yes. They both suk. And that's the only thing they have in common. They are both perfunctorily terrible. Please reward the wonderful multinational agency who made them both. Who are they? Go find a list of shite agencies and look em' up.
As opposed to the local creatives thinking that one agency ripped off themselves and copied one ad for another client - here's what happened. They had one ad for a milk client that used a bad illustration of a spaceship - and then they made another ad for a telephone company with a poorly illustrated spaceship as well. One agency copied their own bad idea and made another bad idea?
Yup. That's what happened. A shite agency turned shite into more shite. But they didn't steal. They simply reproduced bad stuff. Fire the creative director. It's not a copy. It's simply bad X 2.
For a great post on 'Copycats', see Mads Monsen's blog, here.
For Copy Products in Mekong tourism see this post in Come And Go Vietnam
"Over a decade a ago, Eugene H. Trinh made his mark as the first Vietnamese-American to travel into outer space." (Source:http://talk.onevietnam.org/the-famous-whos-who-you-probably-didnt-know/)
ReplyDeleteAt least Vietnamese-American's get into space :)
Ads these bad should simply be ignored.
ReplyDeleteNot worth the time to look at.
I have been asked to look at the Milex campaign more compassionately and was sent copies of the TV work with the words 'emotive' and 'successful' attached to them. And do you know what? The TV work is actually nice. What happened in print? As it turns out Milex is involved with Nasa in some way, and so that makes sense and the TV work is full of fun visuals, well shot and emotionally told. With his/her head screwed on straight the CD could have pulled visual cues and styles from the TV and worked them well into the print, but that didn't happen here. Too bad.
ReplyDeleteBut the point made to me was that the agency used the same campaign twice just because both ads have a cartoony spaceship and blue backgrounds - but that's not a rip. It's just a space theme used twice. Yes, they do look similar and the agency should watch that but I don't see any actual thievery - maybe just a lack of creativity and imagination.