Lotto: It could be you(r idea we’ve ripped off)
The Irish National Lottery last year awarded advertising contracts worth some €20 million to two agencies, DDFH&B and Carat Ireland, to develop “advertising, media and promotional materials” for the lottery.
The result is a campaign on web and TV featuring three semi-adorable fuzzy bears created by Brown Bag Films. Bears which, er, bear more than a passing resemblance to those previously created by Matt Clark and Matt Everitt (two friends of my housemate Ian) which were used in animations for Ricky Gervais’s site.
For the sake of comparison, in the stills below, the bears created by the two Matts are top and the ones from the Lotto ads bottom.
Oh and here’s a page from the wonderfully named youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com with videos just in case there was any doubt left that the Lotto ads were fairly directly inspired by the Matts’ work.
Some of the people on creativeireland.com noticed the resemblance too, and the ensuing discussion brought up the following:
I know two other post houses that pitched on it, the bears were a definite reference as part of the brief but no one wanted to directly rip them off. Any time different character designs were presented though, they kept being brought back to the bear designs by the agency
This really does look like the most blatant ripping off of someone else’s work. The two Matts seem to be taking it rather better than I would, but I hope they end up getting more out of it than sympathy.
January 31st, 2007 14:29
It seems like this goes on in the advertising world all the time. Marketing wonks with no imagination ‘designing’ ad campaigns.
A fren’ o’ mine who made a really cool rock music video explained this to me.
He was approached by a few agencies to do some promotional work. Impressed by his design skillz0rz, they asked him to, basically, do exactly what he did in the really cool rock music video but to promote some brand or product or something.
They didn’t want him to develop something unique for them, they wanted him to ‘do that’.
I imagine the same thing happened here.
Marketing guy: “Hey, I’m paying you to do this, just don’t make it obvious we’re ripping these guys off.”
January 31st, 2007 18:39
I was just emailed a copy of the Dublin Metro article on this, and the Brown Bag quote is that it’s an “obscure” animation, that it “hasn’t even been broadcast.”
It’s as though the internet didn’t happen. I’d say some IP address trawling would soon lead to who did or didn’t look at the animation….
January 31st, 2007 18:42
It looks like threads on creativeireland.com relating to the ‘bears’ have been closed down by the moderators. They said they were acting on advice from lawyers working on behalf brownbag.
Tis all heating up now