THINKing

Steal With Style

Writers “steal with style” all the time - that is they may borrow a phrase from some other writer but somehow make it their own. Thst’s one thing, out-and-out plagiarism is another. Just received a note from Jonathan Kay at Grasshopper about an apparent idea heist. I’ll let Jonathan tell the story,

 A little over 2 months ago we released the video “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World” to spark a movement to help turnaround our economy, remind entrepreneurs why they started in the first place, and inspire others to go out and realize their dreams.   Our goal of this campaign was not to increase sales, but rather to inspire entrepreneurship.  From day 1 the only success metrics we tracked were “number of views”, and “comments & ratings”.

Recently our founder, as well as numerous employees throughout Grasshopper started receiving calls from friends asking if we had done a commercial with American Express.  People kept saying “We heard the song from your Grasshopper video on TV!”.  Like any curious person, when you hear something enough times you start to dig deeper, which is exactly what we did…We discovered Ogilvy & Mather was AMEX’s ad agency.  After some serious research and a lot of time on Google Analytics we discovered maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Ogilvy’s new ad for AMEX is very similar to ours.  Below are a few statistics that well, made us think twice:

·         Between May 1 2009 and July 26^th 2009:

o   Ogilvy agencies visited our Grasshopper website over 15 times, spending nearly 3 hours or total viewing time.

o   The same Ogilvy agency spent the vast majority of these hours on our “idea” page which contains ONLY our video

o   The entirety of their traffic was either around May 4^th (when our campaign first launched) or the 2^nd week in July (right before their campaign launched).

o   The same Ogilvy agency then researched the producer of our video (Sonja Jacob) and visited her site 10+ times, around the exact 2 time period listed above.  All the pages they viewed were specific to Sonja’s Grasshopper work.

Now what bothered us here at Grasshopper is not how oddly similar the 2 ads are, but rather the use our message.  Ogilvy’s use of this “borrowed” message was for direct commercial gain by AMEX to promote their OPEN Forum.  We understand that here at Grasshopper we do ultimately sell a product; but the purpose of this video was to motivate entrepreneurs, or anyone for that matter, to go out and do something, make a difference.  We can’t understand why a near billion dollar agency, with so many resources couldn’t be more creative?  Either way, draw your own conclusions; I simply hope you will consider spreading the word about the video that inspired it all, “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World”, as well as the message that we really are capable of turning this country around. Here are the 2 videos and see all the analytics, and what our founder says.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6MhAwQ64c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSkA91_nURo

What do you think? Was this an outright theft? Speak up.