Scott grew up as a hard-core skater in Vancouver, only giving up his skateboard in his mid twenties.
I grew up a nerdy bookworm, avoiding all physical activity.
Yet even I have seen the Spike Jonze skate video Fully Flared, and made the comment that it was the coolest skate video I’d ever seen.
So if I have seen a skate video, it’s as mainstream as it can ever get - so why Mars decided to completely rip it off for an advertisement for Snickers is a whole new question.
Mars and BBDO Mexico released the below ad for Snickers.
And for perspective, here’s the Spike Jonze directed video. The exact part they ripped off starts at 1:23.
I can only assume that Mars hadn’t seen the video (after all, they are probably all middle aged marketing men in suits) but surely someone at BBDO, at some point, thought “This ad is targeting skate-boarding youth. Perhaps one of them might have seen this video before and realise that we’ve stolen the concept”.
It has shades of the 3m ad rip-off - it’s just lazy marketing. Most people understand paying homage to an idea. Nothing is original these days, but there is a difference between being inspired by an idea to blatently copying a video frame by frame.
A Pro-skateboarder, Steve Berra, said to AgencySpy:
It’s no surprise, I mean, look at television commercials these days, awful. They gotta farm their ideas somewhere because the creative revolution certainly isn’t happening inside their offices. There are better ideas on 17 year old kid’s blogs living in Omaha, Nebraska than in the advertising world. We see on our analytics programs that these ad agencies come on our site every day. We know they’re looking for ideas. It’s sad.
The thing about it is, I like Snickers and I’d like for them to actually be involved with skateboarding, but BBDO may have caused them irreparable damage.
I don’t know, I think people have a short memory, and even if they do choose to boycott Snickers it’s not going to make much difference. But was it really worth losing all the respect from your target audience, just to have this “cool” ad? As it is, it’s a waste of money because everyone knows they just stole the concept.
Why not engage with skaters and try to understand them and their world, if you want to reach them. Why not ask them what makes a good ad, or why they like the Spike Jonze video. In these connected times, you just can’t get away with lazy creative anymore.
This post is tagged under: dishonesty in advertising
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