August 14, 2006
bacardi is hip and cool and relevant to your hip and cool and relevant lifestyle. that’s right.
Wow this is amazing, alcoholic beverage maker Bacardi, along with the ad agency RKCR/Y&R (the UK office of Young & Rubicam) totally ripped-off San Francisco’s infamous underground prankster group The Cacophony Society with their recent “Bacardi Salmon” television commerial.
Since 1994, The Cacophony Society has had their salmon running in the opposite direction during the annual Bay to Breakers 12K race through San Francisco. The salmon would enter at the mid point of the course and then spawn their way upstream. The salmon are mini-celebrities at the race and always get a huge cheer as they go by. The event is known as Breakers to Bay and more on salmon info can be found on Tribe.net, as well as a bunch of salmon photos on Flickr.
[…] Well I guess if you can’t come up with something orginal, you can just follow Bacardi’s lead by co-opting someone else’s idea and “run upstream” with it. Oh yeah, be sure to drink a bunch of rum first.
So did the agency hire some actors to dress up as salmon and interrupt a real, live marathon, a-la the Cachophonites? Of course not. That would require real originality. So they used Computer Graphics instead [Update: They also used 400 extras.]. Also, like Laughing Squid says, “They make no attempt to give any credit to the event’s origins or the person who came up with the idea for the event.“
Oh, and they shot it in New York. Manhattan skyline and all that. How original.
I’ve seen SO MANY original ideas “appropriated” by agencies over the years [especially by UK agencies], this recent episode hardly surprises me. Nothing new here. As one very talented copywriter once told me, “Basically, we’re scavengers”.
I can already see the creative team who came up with this “viral” [Ooh! Buzzword! Hurrah!], sipping cocktails at one of Soho’s trendier bars, impressing the girls with their stories of guts, vision and creativity. Not to mention, the awards and the pay raises. Rock on.
[Thanks to Tara Hunt for the link. I really liked your rant that came with the e-mail, Tara. Almost as much as I enjoyed your recent rant here. Good stuff.]
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Maybe I’ll have to start videoblogging or something. Text just isn’t enough anymore.
Man, if only I could draw, I have all of these badass cartoons in my head.
When it’s the big company stealing from the small and making a “viral”, it’s ripping off. When the small makes steals ideas from the big and appropriates them for their needs, it’s cool.
OK or not? This discussion started a few days ago on 37 Signals.
I saw this at the cinema last week (not knowing the theft involved) and my immediate thought was “oh they’ve realised that Vinnie Jones wasn’t cool and they’re trying to be arty but I still have no intention of ever drinking Bacardi”.
is it adapted and improved ? I think it will work well for them because of how it ends — who is laughing at who is what I read into that ending; it’s OK for me although I would love to ditch Bacardi if I thought they deserved it. –Ok so I will anyway.. they bought the US’s biggest Scotch brand Dewars a few years back. The quality, if anything I hear, has improved — but the image they promote lacks any ‘edge’ — know what I mean Hugh?
I like the idea of Cacos dressing up as Bacardi bottles for the next B2B instead of (or including) the salmon.