LOOK FAMILIAR?

The recent PDN has an article about copycat photos. I see this all the time. Clients show up with the layout utilzing a shot they found and asking for it to be reproduced. I then have to explain how we can't simple copy the shot, we have to make it our own. It's been to the point where clients have directed models to move their appendages precisely to copy what someone has used in the layout. It's a big problem in a smaller market like Winnipeg where the budgets are tight and people aren't allowed to stretch and create their own ideas in the limted time/money they are given. Not to mention the fact that any designer under 35 doesn't know how to do a marker comp to save their life! It's too easy to cut and paste your way through a job. Here's a small excerpt:


"Photographer Joel Meyerowitz was driving around Cape Cod one day when he noticed a man wandering around a parking lot with a view camera and a copy of one of his books, obviously trying to re-create one of Meyerowitz's images.

"I finally walked up behind him and said, 'I think [the spot for the camera] is over here," Meyerowitz recounts. "He got so red in the face [because] he was caught in the act. He said he'd been sent over by Mercedes Benz in Germany to find and shoot the locations I'd shot so they could stick a car into the locations."

Meyerowitz was upset that Mercedes Benz hadn't called him to do the shoot. "I could have used that 25 grand or whatever it was," he says.

That's how a surprising amount of the sausage gets made these days in the advertising business. Copycats abound. Executions frequently re-hash someone else's work, and looking around, you can just feel the déjà vu.

Take, for instance, IBM's recent print campaign from Ogilvy & Mather, called "The World's Help Desk," which uses a series of landscape images to highlight's IBM's IT solutions for various customer types. One of the images, showing a beach from a high vantage point, appears to be the work of Italian art photographer Massimo Vitale. But it turns out to be the work of Tom Nagy, who made the image after the agency discussed Vitale's work with him. "We discussed Vitale, but I definitely asked him to mock Vitale," says Ogilvy's art director, Jennifer MacFarlane.

In fact, photographers' styles are co-opted all the time, and as long as no images are slavishly copied, it's not illegal. "It's just like trends in clothing," says MacFarlane.

But entire executions are also copied, pretty much with impunity. GSD&M's recent print campaign for Wal-Mart, designed to woo Target customers with the message that Wal-Mart has upscale merchandise (and not just basic amenities) is a visual knock-off a campaign that Sears ran back in 1993. (GSD&M recently told The New York Times that the creative similarities were coincidental.)

Malaysia Airlines' agency, Leo Burnett, meanwhile, has cloned the conceptual DNA of Air France's "Height of Pleasure" campaign from Euro RSCG, which features whimsical Elliot Erwitt-esque juxtapositions of photographic elements, such as a shot of a skateboarder, aloft over a half-pipe, who appears to be surfing on the wings of a jet far off in the background sky.

Meanwhile, Crew Creative Advertising's poster for the 2005 Universal Pictures movie "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" looks like the identical twin of an image shot previously by Tony D'Orio for Leo Burnett and its client, Altoids.

"For an instant, I thought of doing something about it, but I didn't think it would go anywhere," says D'Orio. "To prove [intentional copying] would be impossible." So he decided to let it go. "I guess imitation is the highest form of flattery," he says. "I think it would be foolish to get bitter and angry. It's best to say, 'Well, those who are important know where it started and those who don't, so be it.'"

The list of copycat ads goes on and on, as if we've reached the end of the visual universe. Clearly, though, there are always new creative ideas. The advertising competitions prove that again and again. The problem is that so many art directors and photographers, highly compensated as they may be, have resigned themselves to the recycling business. Lack of time, changes in the creative process brought on by new technology, and insecure clients are all to blame. But so is a certain lack of daring and self-respect on the part of creatives.

And they get away with it because the industry doesn't hold them accountable. As it turns out, the legal and ethical boundaries of plagiarism are so fuzzy and subjective that it is difficult to hold anybody accountable. But nobody wants to challenge the status quo, either, for fear of being labeled a crank, or worse, a troublemaker.

It's not surprising then that the urge of so many people in the industry is to brush off the issue. Asked about the IBM ad, Massimo Vitale's rep Bill Charles was adamant: "Let me tell you this: that's not Massimo, and you know it's not Massimo." He conceded, however, that "it's easy to see how they could have used one of Massimo's pictures in the layout." (MacFarlane says they didn't—and didn't need to-because Nagy "knows who [Vitale] is.")

Charles adds, "This whole thing about people grabbing pictures from portfolios, and off the Web sites to use them for comps—it's just a known thing. Everyone knows that everyone does it.… It used to bother me more, but I realize it's just the nature of the beast, and I'm flattered by it.

Creative veterans weaned on marker comps assail computers as a crutch that stifles creativity. "Your concepts have to come from a clean sheet of paper," asserts Todd Hoffman, a group creative director at BBDO/Chicago. "If you sell a client on a comp that's hand-drawn, you can evolve it as you go."

By contrast, when the comp is built around a photograph, Hoffman explains, "All the client sees is a finished ad. They don't see that it's a starting point" that allows for additional creative input from the photographer who ends up getting the assignment.

It's a recipe for plagiarism, but clients are now wedded to it, because it takes uncertainty out of the process (and saves time).

"Occasionally we can still show drawings, but it's hard to present an idea and say, 'Well, it's not exactly like this, but this is the overall feeling,'" says O & M's MacFarlane.

"The difficulty is that clients are a visually uneducated group. It's a rare client who can accept that we create our own picture from the idea, without shooting to the comp," says freelance producer Philip Pavliger, who was previously an art buyer at McCann-Erickson in San Francisco.

Agencies end up hiring photographers to copy comp images, and not infrequently, either. Photographer Jeff Sedlik says that practically every comp he's asked to shoot these days comes with a photo rather than a rendered drawing. "Very often [the client] wants it tight [copied]—and increasingly so," he says. (Ad agencies even ask photographers to copy stock images, he notes, because it often costs less to assign the shoot than to license the stock.)

Creatives, clients and photographers are all complicit, which means plagiarism is everyone's responsibility, and, therefore, nobody's. How can anyone be held accountable when everyone can point the finger at someone else who is just as guilty?

Still, the problem isn't necessarily inevitable or intractable. There are compelling self-interested reasons for everyone involved to change their behavior. Clients might get better advertising, for instance, if they insisted on creative originality from their ad agencies, trusted the agency's expertise, and rewarded the results.

For creatives, doing original work (logically) is simply a matter of self-respect. "You can feel it" when an ad is a knock off, says Hoffman. "You may not be able to put your finger on it, but you're like, 'I've seen that image.' Then you just kind of blow it off as not very good. In the long run, it hurts the creative who is trying to build his book. They're not going to get the next job."
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