you wait all year for a sheepdog gag then…
10 April, 2012 at 8:35 am 1 comment
Northern car supermarket business The Car People released their new ad (by Leeds agency Propaganda) just in time for the Easter Bank Holiday
The problem is, it’s terribly, terribly close in concept to the Guinness St Patricks Day viral by AMV BBDO from last month (first released around 29th Feb, but it didn’t go mainstream until about 14th March as far as I can tell as 30 second broadcast teasers driving people online & PR also kicked in):
I’m not for a second suggesting that there’s some idea theft going on here – in fact any agency that could nick an idea, turn it round and get it on air within 6 weeks probably doesn’t need to.
I can really sympathise with both the agency (which I’ve never worked for) and the client – judging by the timings suggested by this piece on their website Propaganda were already in production by the time they would have become aware of the Guinness creative. With a strict air deadline (Easter being a key time of year for car sales), I can’t imagine that there was anything they could do except crack on.
It’s a good ad. And although the Guinness version had over 2M views on youtube alone, it will have passed a lot of the second hand car buying audience by. But Propaganda and the creatives who worked on it are unlikely to have their efforts fully appreciated by their peers as a) they were second to air and b) I think the Guinness one is actually slightly better.
Entry filed under: advertising, ooops. Tags: AMV BDDO, Guinness, Propaganda, The Car People.
1. Is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery? « desertlandscapes | 11 April, 2012 at 7:58 am
[...] difficult – even in marketing – to draw the line. Packaging is more clear-cut, but Gemma has just written about how this can happen in ads – and it always looks bad for the second [...]