Red Handed: Nissan + TBWA

“Stealing things is a glorious occupation, particularly in the art world.” – Malcolm Mclaren

Inspired by little known blog, You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, we’ve decided to blow up some advertising spots for taking the idea of inspiration a tad too far.

Nissan? TBWA? Looks like you got some explainin’ to do. The first image is a print ad for Nissan Espana’s launch of the Qashqai. See the full brief from TBWA here. The second image is taken on the streets of Barcelona. You can see the artist btoy working on the wall piece in the left hand corner. Hmmm??? Looks as though the agency lifted a huge chunk of creative right there. Odd, because TBWA did such a great, original job with the Qashqai skateboard spots. Note to agencies: you will get caught if you poach creative. The internet is the great loud speaker. From the artist (who writes passable English):

“We know that street art it´s public & should be for everyone. The thing in that case its that in fact they didn’t take this image from the street,they take it from the book that we publicate this chistmas with belio…so the image is registered to us & belio with copyright. I know that is the same photo that we take cause i multiplicate both images(original & fake) in photoshop & the lines match perfectly
We are planing now to get into legal actions.”

You can see the original posting from YTWWN and the comments, which are fascinating here.