Blatant thievery at the Chip Shop Awards 2011

I’ve posted before about how I think the Chip Shop Awards are brilliant and a chance to recharge your creative batteries by showcasing ideas that would normally get shot down.

However, no-one takes the awards particularly seriously or considers them as much of an accolade as, say, a Cannes Lion or a D&AD Pencil. So why do agencies risk their reputations by sending in blatantly plagiarised work for the chance to win such a minor award?

This year, there are at least three entries that are blatantly ripped off from elsewhere. In reverse order of heinousness, here are the three I’ve spotted:

3. ‘Great white teeth’ for Colgate by Dinosaur

The ad:

The ‘inspiration’:

The idea from this ad pretty clearly came from a series of sharks photoshopped to have human teeth, posted by c_kick of totalleh.com on B3ta. However, the agency at least seem to have written the line themselves, so that’s kind of OK.

Edit: It’s just been pointed out to me by @adambodfish on twitter that this entry is actually from last year – it’s rather confusing since it’s featured prominently on the Chip Shop homepage! Oh well, the point stands.

2. ‘Every Lidl Helps’ by Walker Agency

A direct rip-off of not only another agency’s work, but work that won a Chip Shop Award in a previous year. Talk about diddling on your own doorstep.

Walker Agency’s ad:

The original, from Saatchi & Saatchi X in 2009:

And a third ad created specifically to take the piss out of this apparent, er, coincidence by Thinking Juice, entered into this year’s awards under the category ‘There’s no such thing as a new idea’ (fairly generous in my opinion, I’d have gone for ‘Copycuntery’ after this great blog):

And the winner:

1. ‘We Sell Fridges’ by C21 Advertising

This one takes the absolute cake. Behold ‘their’ ad:

And then this photo of a real shop in Liverpool, which has been floating around the internet for donkeys’ years:

What an absolute pisstake. It’s even the same photo with the same guy standing in front of the shop. Ironically, this is entered in the ‘best use of plagiarism’ category, because of the use of Selfridges’ branding. Not because they admit they’re thieving gobshites. I’d love to hear their justification for this.

I have to say, stuff like this makes me lose a bit of faith in the industry and the awards. For every ad born out of an original idea or insight and slaved over, there seems to be one stolen wholesale from somewhere else and shamelessly entered with an agency’s name plastered over it. Thankfully it never seems to be the good agencies, and lets us all know never to submit our CVs and portfolios to C21 Advertising. Because you just know your first brief on your first day would be ‘The client likes this YouTube video, can you just do another one of those?’.

For shame.

EDIT: In adding the agency links to this post, I discovered that Walker Agency’s website bears a striking resemblance to Rainey Kelly’s, particularly in the colour scheme and lettering style (click for bigger):

(Walker Agency on the left, RKCR/Y&R on the right)

Really classy, guys.

The Chip Shop Awards nominations are in…

…and one of them is for the ambient ad for a dentist I spotted in situ last month.

But that pales in comparison to some of the other entries there. It was a revelation flicking through them all: so many laugh-out-loud, shouldn’t-find-it-funny-but-really-do, swap-your-whole-portfolio-for-it ideas. Maybe that doesn’t say much for my portfolio, but it does say a lot about us creatives. We get pretty roundly lambasted by popular opinion, the media and everyone else in the industry who isn’t a creative. In fact, some of us get lambasted by other creatives – see the comments on pretty much any Creative in London post for examples.

But we’re not rubbish. None of us want to make those crappy ads you keep seeing, with cheesy straplines, painful copy or even ideas stolen wholesale from the internet. It’s just that often, the clients won’t let us make our good ideas. Or they agree to them, and then chip, chip, jackhammer away until it’s one tiny fragment of idea and a whole mosaic of “improvements”. It’s not their fault – they have to protect their jobs, and good ideas are scary. But it can be mighty frustrating sometimes, and the Chip Shop nominations are a timely reminder that actually, London’s collective creative department is excellent at what it does.

You can see the whole list of nominations yourself here, but these are the three that stood out the most to me:

The “how did you make a dog look morose on cue?” award for best use of model:

It’s a lovely use of medium and everything, but that’s been addressed already. So I’m giving this one an award for somehow depressing a dog to the point that it was able to communicate its balefulness despite having no eyebrows.

Actually, I think that might just be what happens when someone slaps a sandwich board on you and says “Off you go then, lad”.

The “I’m definitely going to hell for laughing at this, but it was worth it” award for tastelessness:

(That’s Josef Fritzl, in case you, like Planbot, utterly failed to get it). This is in a completely different universe to work that would ever run. This would never ever run in any country, for any client, ever. But that’s why it’s hilarious – it’s practically an anti-ad. “Josef Fritzl shops here” isn’t the greatest message to send out, but I like to think that in the parallel universe where ads are this un-PC all the time, it still increased sales of shame-hiding ring binders.

The “you’re making me rethink my position on puns, and that’s dangerous” award for inspired wordplay:

Everyone loves it when competitors get bitchy with each other in their adverts, and this one is a prime example. Not only have they stuck up a poster outside Tesco saying “Fuck this, go to Lidl”; they’ve actually nicked Tesco’s slogan to do it. Which makes the high school gossip queen portion of my soul rejoice. Good work, Saatchi & Saatchi X (or as I like to call them, Saatchi Kiss. They probably wouldn’t appreciate it, much as M&C Saatchi don’t like it when I call them McSaatchi’s. Can’t think why).