AT&T & Verizon: I Thought It Was Called Creative [RANT]
Published May 25th, 2010
One often fascinating and frequently overlooked part of advertising are the disclaimers that run, often in a small hard to read font, at the bottom of the screen. You can learn a lot from reading the disclaimers, especially ones that appear after a campaign has already been running.
For example, all of the commercials for Motorola’s smart phone the Droid contain a disclaimer that the word is actually a trademark of Lucasfilm. Granted George Lucas gave us R2D2 and C3P0 but who knew you could own a word. If these disclaimers came along after Droid’s marketing began you can bet Motorola didn’t.
Now a disclaimer has appeared on a series of AT&T commercials. The spots show huge pieces of orange fabric being unrolled over buildings and well-known landmarks to illustrate how completely AT&T’s mobile network blankets the country.
The spots are visually engaging and illustrate the point in a unique way. But now at the very end in small type it says, “The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect association with AT&T.”
Huh?!
Some quick research reveals that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are husband and wife artists who have created giant art installations around the world by wrapping entire buildings and geographic areas in different types of cloth. Sound familiar?!
Amongst other things the couple has wrapped the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; an oceanfront beach in Newport, Rhode Island; and a large part of New York’s Central Park. You can see pictures at their Web site.
The artists donated the merchandising rights from the New York project to the charitable foundation Nurture New York’s Nature and the Arts which shared proceeds with The Central Park Conservancy. Now AT&T has stolen the idea for an ad campaign. Silly me! I always thought they called it ad creative for a reason. I’ve never heard it called ad copying.
I realize that modifying someone else’s concept isn’t a new idea, but taking the work of two artists for a cellular network commercial just seems wrong. At the very least the campaign should pay homage to them or make a donation to a charitable organization they have supported.
Instead they get a disclaimer.
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