Good artists borrow, great artist steal, right? Why put all this effort, strategically and creatively, into putting out new campaigns when you can just steal an old one? Stealing the ones that are tested and proven is just so much cheaper! And they work! Most of the customers out there are not pathological followers of Ads of The World and will never notice.
I truly believe that you could start an agency, let’s call it The CopyCat Agency, with basically no creative talent more than the ability to match up brand and campaign. You would make a ton of cash. You would (apparently) win contests, and you would have the best possible strategy for competing in emerging markets such as China. And even though we haven’t seen that exact agency name yet, there are agencies like that already, at least creative teams specializing in carbon paper magic.
So why don’t we do this? Well – there is really no reason. Except that all advertising would eventually look the same, and that we would have no creative people working with advertising anymore.
So we need to create a short term incentive not to steal in order to solve the long term problem. And personally, I think THIS is the true purpose of contests. Contests should provide the short term incentive to create something truly new and unique. Unfortunately, they don’t. Take a moment to go through recent contest winners and see for yourself.
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