EmailA road safety campaign for Volkswagen China that turned into a global viral hit is facing legal action for allegedly ripping off a five-year old ad campaign.
Volkswagen’s agency, WPP-owned Ogilvy & Mather, posted a video on YouTube called Eyes on the Road that aimed to raise awareness about the dangers of using a mobile phone while driving.
The ad, which has been viewed 25m times, shows “unsuspecting movie-goers” in Hong Kong watching a clip of a car travelling down the road as if they are in the driver’s seat.
The audience receives a mobile-phone call and while they are distracted, the car crashes – the ad ends with a message about the dangers of phone use and driving.
Karen Corrigan, founder of ad agency Happiness Brussels, says that the campaign breaches the intellectual property of its own ad from 2009.
“I looked at it closely with my lawyer for intellectual property and it is clearly a rip-off,” she said.
Corrigan’s Let it Ring campaign, which is well-known globally after winning a slew of awards at the Cannes Lions festival, was run for OVK, an organisation in Belgium supporting the parents of child road victims.
“The whole thing is completely based on the same mechanic, the only difference is it is for VW and not a safety organisation,” she said. “It is the same message, [mobile call] mechanic. They did not re-use our film but the style is an exact copy.”
Plagiarism of creative ideas is a relatively common issue in the advertising industry, however Corrigan says that in this case the agency had successfully trademarked certain elements, such as the mobile call mechanic.
Corrigan says the agency has pitched the idea to many agencies, and at awards events, to offer the mechanic to be licensed to third parties for a fee.
“You can’t protect ideas, but we can protect the mechanic, the format,” she said. “I have put it for sale. We have presented to many creative people to license it and sell it internationally. [The VW version] means I can’t put it for sale anymore. They have taken away our intellectual property and an important source of income.”
Corrigan says the agency has sent a cease-and-desist”letter to O&M and also to VW, but has not received a reply.
She has also asked for a licence fee or at least a mention of Happiness and their client OVK.
“With 24m views, I think the damage to us is done,” she said.
In a statement, OgilvyOne Beijing said: “These campaigns are not related. Our work uses location-based technology in a cinematic experience to highlight the dangers of texting while driving.”
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