Theft, “borrowing” or just plain lame?
If you’ve never heard of the satire comic “Get Your War On” there are two ways to do so:
1. You can go to David Rees’ site and see the comic he’s been writing for years. Or…
2. You can see the new Jamba Juice ad on the left that many are calling a rip-off.
I’m not really going to get into whether or not Jamba blatantly ripped off GYWO. But it’s led to an interesting debate in the comments section over at BoingBoing. Since the illustrations are clip art, is it all fair game? Or does Jamba Juice deserve to get hammered for trying to steal from Rees? Advertising has always borrowed from pop culture and remixed art into ads. But did this cross the line from borrowing to rip off?
Rees is just killing Jamba left and right on his blog and doing a fair job of arguing his point. He’s also pointing out some sloppy advertising work on the part of Jamba, who apparently can’t even get the names of its characters right.
The problem now is that everyone is piling on. Fast Company wrote an article ripping Jamba Juice for the gaffe and in addition to BoingBoing, blogs like Consumerist are ranting and #jambajuicefail is all over Twitter.
All I know is that Jamba Juice needs to come up with an apology quickly before they’re overtaken by the social media machine that is Web 2.0.
UPDATE: The ads were ripped off… um… created by the Neighbor Agency in Southern Cal.
Filed under: Are you kidding me? | 1 Comment
Tags: advertising, ridiculous, rip-off
It’s sadly both. It’s theft and lame.