The New Coca-Cola Blue!

August 11, 2004 6:30 AM

Advertising Copycats is a site where various ad prints are compared for resemblances, from odd coincidences to downright plagiarism. [in French]
posted by Masi (12 comments total)

Very cool, masi, thanks. There's a lot of stuff there.

I especially liked the Coke and Pepsi lemon juicer twin ads. Those two really were separated at birth.
posted by orange swan at 6:39 AM on August 11, 2004

Cool site, thanks for the link!

The seatbelt suntan stripe at the top of page 4 is an unbelievable ripoff.
posted by derbs at 9:34 AM on August 11, 2004

These are so great. Thanks!
posted by rhapsodie at 9:38 AM on August 11, 2004

Ad execs are hacks - it's true.
posted by destro at 10:02 AM on August 11, 2004

All the big advertising award shows print books of the winning ideas each year. Creative types love going through these books, out of admiration and for inspiration. Unfortunately, some don't understand there's a line between "inspiration" and "stealing". It could be an homage/parody (like the Adidas/Reebok foosball ads) or a subliminal remembrance or a hack thinking nobody will ever notice.

But not all ad execs are hacks. In order to copy an idea, somebody else had to think it up first. The copier is a hack, but the originator can be a creative genius (depending on the quality of the spot - original doesn't always mean good).

Some of the comparisons are a bit of a stretch. The McDonald's fries ad, for example. It wouldn't surprise me if the second agency was told to reproduce that ad for a different market. Since they weren't the originating agency for the first creative execution, they would have to create their own design. And the pengiun/bear with the zipper... come on. Any ad with an animal+zipper combination is a copy?

Good stuff, though.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 10:38 AM on August 11, 2004

derbs -- maybe the second add is inspired by, but not a ripoff off, the previous ad. That must happen some - - someone thinking that an advert sort of got the idea right, but failed to really nail it. Seems to me that the second of the two 'seat belt' ads is much more interesting.
posted by john m at 11:14 AM on August 11, 2004

My god. Some of those are such terrible, blatant rip-offs. The clients should be demanding a refund.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:29 AM on August 11, 2004

Some of them, however, are things like "woman hugging beefcake from behind" - that's sort of a universally used motif. And as john pointed out, it's funny when the ripoff did a better job than the original. Anyways, good link, thanks.
posted by kavasa at 11:38 AM on August 11, 2004

Great link!

More here, courtesy of dabitch.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 11:57 AM on August 11, 2004

Awesome. (Masi's find, that is, not the knock-offage.)
posted by me3dia at 12:22 PM on August 11, 2004

Fantastic link. Usually when I come up with an idea and someone says "Oh that's just like X", I then bin the idea. Maybe from now on I'll just go "Oh it must be a good idea then..."
posted by meech at 3:24 PM on August 11, 2004

Several of the combos look like the original was from one country, then the copycat was used in another. "People in Belgium will never notice I stole an idea from South Africa..."
posted by gimonca at 5:05 PM on August 11, 2004