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As Creativereview noticed the playface commercial isn't the first one to do photographs of peoples faces as they react to stuff. Not sure if the Playstation ads were meant to look like sex, but some of the expressions do. (And imho the whole sex-angle makes it funnier, to me)
Creative review reckons it reminds them of Coco De Mer & Trojan campaign that we badlanded here previously. There the photographs are based on portraits taken at the moment of climax.

I've been asked to "retweet this far and wide", over on Advertiser in Arabia blog, the author whose goal is to "establish myself as a provocative MarCom voice" is pointing out the similarities between the UK VW Cinema campaign to a set of ads from Leo Burnett, Cairo for client Melody. With extra exclamation marks. Three to be exact.

The Egyptian ads open with a super stating the year- ١٩٩٥ and ١٩٨٥ - that's 1995 and 1985 for those who don't read arabic numbers, a little thing I picked up when living in Jeddah only so that I could remind my dad when to 'slow down, we're not on the autobahn' as he suffered from lead foot most of his life. The VW ads open with a super stating "Volkswagen presents".

Adfreak just spotted the Indian Omex camera campaign which was on the 2009 Cannes Lions longlist via some gossip-blog, but failed to notice that the idea of stalking camera features has been done for LeicaShop “Extra Wide Lens Cameras” as well. The funny here is that both campaigns were on the cannes Lions longlist this summer - but neither one made it to the shortlist. The jury must have felt like they were seeing double, for once not due to the free flowing rosé.

Then again that wasn't street art seen everywhere either. The creepy part of the Obama poster is that it seems to be a campaign not done by street artists. Over at Metafilter sef-described "one of the guys who co-founded Andre The Giant has a posse" comments on these posters with the zing-twist at the end:

Oh. And one other thing. This is slight, but for the trained eye it's gold. You know that whole, Frank Shepard Fairey vs. AP vs. AP photographer hullabaloo over fair use and the Fairey Obama campaign poster? Well, anyone recognize the Joker-fied Obama image? Say, from the cover of TIME magazine?
Now that's irony!

Many people have emailed to point out the handheld-boob trend going on right now. EURO RSCG Warsaw, did an ad explaining experience in lingerie by showing a much older womans hands cupping the breasts of a young model for Aniela. They all pointed out that ALMAP/BBDO already did this for Meias Liz Underwear.

The whole campaign for Meias Liz shows mens hands as various lingerie items, a bra, a demi-cup bra, a pair of knickers. I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean but it makes pretty pictures. The idea isn't "have your boobs cupped by our 40 years of experience" anyway. Maybe the idea was "Feel like some random man is grabbing your crotch", I don't know. Either way, not really turning me - the potential target - on enough to consider either brand of lingerie.

It's been brewing all weekend, it looks like Samantha Beeston, a young British artist, won the Textprint illustration prize with patterns that were directly traced from Lauren Nassef's and other artists work. Not "inspired by", but traced. Like the Nazi Meat.
Samantha's own website has gone offline, and she's mysteriously missing from the lineup of Textprint winners - the group shot has six people but there are only five winners listed now.

youthoughtwewouldn'tnotice blog has posted some of the images side by side in the post Samantha Beeston Traces Her Way To Glory: I thought I would create this post for posterity then, so that even if Beeston manages to erase all trace of her terrible theft there would still be this proof.

Even her sketchbook is full of traced, copied and perhaps even photocopied items (making more of a scrap book IMHO)

Samantha went to Falmouth, a school with quite a good reputation, and she got high marks. How will this affect the school reputation? Did they not discuss that line between being inspired and plain plagiarizing?

Colenso BBDO had some fun with ideas for promoting "America's Next Top Model" - here they added the silly dog as a nice touch. But yep, you know I'm about the say it so I might as well rip it off like a band-aid. The whole "X is so thin she fall through cracks" visual is tried and true, usually for products like slimfast.

This weeks mysterious coincidence is brought to you by David Hauser of Grasshopper and his googleanalytics. Did Ogilvy and American express get inspired by “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World” (which would be kind of approriate since it's meant to be an inspiration video, funny)
Is this a case of overly inspired, demo-love, or are these footprints in the digital world there for a much simpler reason -such as; Ogilvy heard from other people that their ad was similar to grasshoppers and wanted to check it out for themselves? What do you think?

Between May 1 2009 and July 26th 2009:
o Ogilvy agencies visited our Grasshopper website over 15 times, spending nearly 3 hours or total viewing time.
o The same Ogilvy agency spent the vast majority of these hours on our “idea” page which contains ONLY our video
o The entirety of their traffic was either around May 4th (when our campaign first launched) or the 2nd week in July (right before their campaign launched).
o The same Ogilvy agency then researched the producer of our video (Sonja Jacob) and visited her site 10+ times, around the exact 2 time period listed above. All the pages they viewed were specific to Sonja’s Grasshopper work.

For the ultimate irony, beating out the copy center copied ads, and the the arkitektkopia copied ads - Jelapompe just found twin ad ideas for copy-centers actually using twins as a guerilla stunt and that was just to much twinnage to pass up, check out "perfect copies".
Left and top the UNI-Copycenter twins , top and bottom Staples twins, see images properly on joelapompe. I'll stop laughing sometime tomorrow. That is a weird sync.

"It's a little sad that they didn't come to me first, when they have sold something that I've already developed. It feels like some creatives should get the title "researchers" as they sit and scan the web for ideas that they can sell to clients. But this isn't a new phenomena, and at the same time it's nice to know that someone thought "I like this, I want my own version". They should at least have tried to take it further, add something new, like for example Shynolas new video for Coldplay.

In all businesses things go a little wonky at the height of summer. Interns take over, TV channels show the "commercial goes here" sign instead if the commercial that should have gone there (I managed to catch that on one of my old tapes, hilarious), at your favorite lunch place the median age of all employed suddenly drops with ten years, and newspapers in Sweden rewrite an insignificant non-story to death in a phenomena that has its own name: "Nyhetstorka" (news drought), as all the real journalists have kicked off their shoes and are relaxing in the sun somewhere.

I think I have figured out what happens at all ad agencies right after the Cannes hangover and soon before the christmas cheer briefs hit our desks. The Super Heroes attack our collective ideabrain.

Now here the hero is again. This time it's Mullen agency that at least had the brilliant idea to call up Adam West to lend his Batman-super-voice to our everyday heroes that take control over their economy. How far we've come, last year it was all save electricity and others, this year it's all about the money.

Whoever made this ad is probably a 22 year-old “creative” at some ad agency in Tech Valley, CA. Way to think outside the box, sonny. Have fun snorting cocaine at the nightclub you go to with your friends who work at Twitter or wherever. And no, Adult Swim will NOT buy your stupid cartoon you’re developing with your housemates about four guys who work at an ad agency but are secretly lobsters.

Now, I'm not sure if GYWO can do anything about this, after all the clip art is clip art, and you can not copyright an idea. What is left then? Sarcastic style? Hmm. Had it been trademarked there might be a case. I do know that it was rather obvious David Rees isn't the type to be flattered by a juice-corporations homage to the strip, and it's clear that the strip is inspired by GYWO, not the stock clip art.