Thirst can be a powerful urge, but who knew it could cause sleepwalking? That's what millions of viewers learned a couple of weeks ago when Coca-Cola aired a new 60-second TV commercial of a somnambulistic man making his way across an African landscape, blithely unaware as he comes inches from being attacked by a leopard, crushed by a herd of elephants, munched by a hippo and killed by a swarm of poisonous snakes, all on his way to a frosty bottle of Coke awaiting him in a fridge.
Israelis already knew about the power of thirst, because eight years ago, they'd seen a strikingly similar 45-second commercial for Yotvata chocolate milk: A man rises from bed in the dead of night and sleepwalks around town without successfully finding a bottle for sale – at which point he wakes in horror and goes to his fridge, where he finds a cold Yotvata that slakes his thirst.
Both ads were set to the trance-like march of Ravel's Bolero.
Less than a day after the Coke effort aired during the Super Bowl, someone posted a side-by-side comparison of the two commercials on YouTube, edited down to 23 seconds, which made it seem as if they were practically exact copies.
Asked about the similarities, a Coca-Cola spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the company and its agency were unaware of the Yotvata ad before the flap.
“While the two share a few common elements, any similarities are coincidental and unintended,” she wrote, adding that Coke's relationship with Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland agency behind Sleepwalkers, was unchanged.
But sitting in his London office the other day, Matt Beaumont chuckled at the story. “We used to make a joke, a long time ago, before the Internet and before everything became so globalized: There's a rule for stealing ideas, which was, ‘five years or 5,000 miles,'” he said. “If it was at least five years old, or done at least 5,000 miles away, you could steal it. That was a kind of running gag back in the '90s. But then the Internet came along and we can see what they're doing in Africa now.”
And vice versa. “It's a different world now, and it's much harder not to get caught.”
This is the point in the story in which life imitates art because Mr. Beaumont, who is a creative director at M&C Saatchi, is also a part-time novelist. His first novel, an effervescent and well-received effort titled e, set in a London ad agency, revolved around the tale of a desperate creative director who steals a concept from the portfolio of a pair of young job seekers and turns it into a pitch. The prospective client? Coke.
Though perhaps that was more like art imitating life, for in his many years in the business, Mr. Beaumont has witnessed theft many times. He once saw an idea for Speedo in a student portfolio that showed up a short time later in a Speedo campaign, with no recompense to the students.
When he was working in Hong Kong in the late '80s, he said, a British art director newly arrived from the U.K. came calling with a reel that happened to include a TV commercial that Mr. Beaumont had done back in London only a couple of years before. Indeed, it had won an award at Cannes.
Theft like that is naked and obvious. Far more common these days are instances of what appear to be direct inspiration, often pulled from the Internet. In that respect, advertising has caught the same virus as numerous other forms of media that swim in the same pool of popular culture, where information may want to be free but its creators want at least to be credited.
