Adland is no stranger to plagiarism and credit hogging. Charges of copying ideas regularly surface in ad circles. Recently, a former creative director of content company Pocket Aces pointed out that FCB India, maker of Google’s latest ad titled ‘Mr India’, is frame-by-frame similar to an animated video he posted as a Reel on his Instagram account in June 2023.
“It flows exactly the same way that my story flows. The shot composition, storyboard as well. Even the expression the character makes as she tries to find the sea-view are the exact same! It doesn’t stop there. The final reveal, the final zoom-in to the sea is done the same way,” wrote Abhinav Krishna on social media.
“I have not been contacted about this video nor am I credited. In fact, a friend saw the Google ad and reached out to me because it looked so similar,” he further added in his post.
John Thangaraj, group chief strategy officer, at FCB Group, responded to Krishna’s post on LinkedIn. Thangaraj wrote that their film is inspired by a scene from the nineties film Mr. India which starred Anil Kapoor, and if at all there are any similarities in the two works, it is coincidental.
“By way of introduction, I lead strategy for FCB here in India, and was personally involved in this project. Our film is inspired by a scene from the original Mr. India, which was released back in 1987. I’m not sure if you’ve watched the original, but if you have, you’ll recall a scene early on in the movie, where Arun (Anil Kapoor’s character) is hard selling his room for rent to Seema (Sridevi’s character),” wrote Thangaraj.
He further said, “Having only seen screen shots of your animated short and not the video itself, I can’t comment on the framing of our own film vis-a-vis yours. What I can say however is that both FCB and Google adhere to the very highest standard of creative integrity and if there is at all, even the slightest similarity to your own work, that similarity is wholly coincidental. While I realize it’s easy to make accusations in the age of social media, I would encourage you to be a little more circumspect in doing so going forward.”
Shubho Sengupta, a LinkedIn user candidly asked Krishna, “What if the producers of Mr India claimed you lifted their original story? After all your binocs story is very similar to the AK/Sri encounter.” His response was “If they do sue me for showing a scene where a character uses binoculars to look in the distance, then I will consider myself very very unlucky. In any case, you can see the full video that I made and take a call if it’s lifted from Mr.India or not.”
Creative professionals have been actively using social media when due credits are not given or ideas are allegedly copied/lifted/inspired. For instance, Amer Jaleel, ex group CCO and chairman, MullenLowe Lintas Group took to LinkedIn to talk about a Motilal Oswal ad. Back in 2017, Lintas used to manage the Motilal Oswal account. They had come up with a series of ideas back then that Motilal Oswal had built upon in 2022 when they released the ad.
Last year, HDFC Bank’s campaign that talked about fraud detection and prevention was accused of plagiarism too. Created by advertising agency Kinnect, the campaign titled ‘Vigil Aunty’ was accused of being plagiarised from author and artist Appupen’s character that was created in 2016 for the Indie satire comic called Halahala comics.