While surfing on welcome to optimism (W+K's London blog), I found this great post about Cutwater - a San Fransisco agency that has had success for two videos for clients Ray Ban and Levi's.
Each of the videos have over 3 million views on YouTube and by all measures, are huge, viral hits. That being said, Cutwater has executed the same idea for two different brands. The products are different but the execution and idea are exactly the same.
For an industry driven on unique and original ideas, what does this mean? All agencies are looking for success, especially in digital, but at what cost? If something works for one client, should we simply copy it outright and fit it too another? Maybe.
But to what extent? It's one thing to reference the success your agency has had through new biz case studies and quite another to apply the same idea to another one of your own brands. Even if Dove evolution was successful, I don't want to retrofit that idea to my new Tampon brand (awkward example but still...).
I can only imagine how this was sold to the clients. "Well," says the cool creative director, "we had huge success with Ray Ban and sunglasses and we want to do the exact same thing for you...except with jeans." The AD is happy about it - it worked before after all - why not for us? And the client? They don't have to make any leaps...they asked for a viral video and why not use something that works?
Because it's unoriginal. Because it's not what you hire an agency for. Anyone could copy Whopper Freakout or Dove Evolution but we're hired to think strategically about our brand, not someone else's. I'm all for knowing what brands are succeeding in the space and learning about what strategies got them there. But let's use those strategies to discover ideas that fit the brand, not the trend.
Ray Ban [Posted a year ago]:
Levi's [Posted 4 weeks ago]:
7 comments:
Good observation. Perhaps people are taking the term copywriter too literally. May be we soon might have some copy-agencies waiting to earn moolah by reproducing the same work for several clients. If an agency or a creative person comes up with an ad (geniunely created by them), and if it appears to be similar even a bit to any creative done earlier, it always attacts criticism from one and all. Now what do we say about the example you mentioned!
Excellent thought and when you think about the reproduction (copying) that occurs in other industries, why wouldn't companies in other countries adopt successful campaigns from other parts of the globe? If you see a great Telco campaign in Australia that raised sales and met similiar objectives, why not make it more Canadian and just steal it?
Interesting. WK London (where you found this) copied the artists Fischli & Weiss for their award winning mega-hit 'cog.' Fallons copied an idea from Letterman for 'balls.'
So which is better (or worse)? Copying yourself, or copying others? Pot calling the kettle black?
(Come to think about it, even this post is pretty much what was written over at welcome to optimism.)
Fair point. But using that logic, are there any real, new idea's out there? All stories come from the same 6-8 archetypes (Karl Jung) and as a result, they are really just variations on each other. There are still creative versions of those variations and obviously some are better than others (Shakespeare vs. Paris Hilton, for example).
Blogs are another example. As a blogger, I search the web for content and stories that I find interesting and put my own spin on them. W+K's blog gave me this example which I took, and provided my own take for anyone interested.
I don't know what is a better or worse (in regards to your question), but I do think that applying one campaign idea specifically to multiple brands is a bit lazy. Agencies can get away with it because the general public has no idea who makes the ads, other than the brands themselves.
Essentially, I wouldn't want to be with an agency whose case studies contain the exact same idea for every business problem. And I don't know if many clients would either.
This isn't to discredit Cutwater. The work they did is excellent and few agencies have had the viral success that they have. I just wonder what Levi's viral ideas were on the table before this final version was chosen.
Thoughts?
I agree that blogs are different (though I think your spin and WK's is about the same). And I agree that what happened here appears a little lazy. But it sounds like there are more Levi's virals yet to come - hopefully they find a new soundtrack.
However, I don't know that I buy colored balls bouncing down the hills of San Francisco as a Jungian archetype.
Again, fair point. Bravia is a good example of an original tactic against a new product. But even Fallon has reused unique ideas, and for Sony as well. Their extension of the Bravia campaign - Clay Bunnies in NY - was an idea that had already been created by two LA artists:
http://madvertisingblog.wordpress.com/2007/10/06/the-new-sony-bravia-commercial-stolen/
The main point is that I don't think Fallon (or many agencies) would be credible if they went to another large client of theirs (Orange for example) and proposed a "Viral" idea that was dumping 250,000 cellphones on the streets of San Fran.
the general role of advertising is to hold up a mirror to various communities - maybe cutwater's strategy was to create a similar type video that would appear to be guys 'imitating' the rayban video in hopes that this may inspire other copycat vids. May be a brilliant strategy, or very flawed.
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