orbasquara

I found this fantastic site today promoting the album "the trouble with flying" by orba squara. The site is basically a scrolling flash documentation by Jose Cabaco and the Random Collective of a road trip across the country to follow the band's tour. Its a great collection of typography, photography, illustration, hand-drawn lettering and collage and it's really interesting to scroll through what looks like a digital accordian style book. It also definitely makes me want to go on a road trip and document my own adventure. Surprisingly it also makes me want to start writing... Here are a few screenshots:

Seriously?

There's an interesting and controversial article up on AdAge today discussing similarities between a spot by Grasshopper and one by Ogilvy & Mather for AmEx. David Hauser from Grasshopper is arguing that Ogilvy stole the creativity of their spot, which after seeing the 2 together is ridiculous. Yes they both discuss the importance of entrepreneurs in today's economy and both have similar music but the similarities end there. Discussing the importance of entrepreneurs is hardly anything ground-breaking, over the past few years I must have seen dozens of videos saying the same thing, for a variety of different companies, and type "entrepreneur" into google and you'll find millions of hits about the importance of going out and doing something, as well as how to do it.
The Grasshopper execution is hardly original, using Flash to make the words form in blocks of text across the screen. I've seen this a dozen times in commercials for Midol, Ford trucks and everything in between. One of the responses on AdAge reminded me of TheGirlEffect.org that I saw last semester, which in essence is the same as the Grasshopper spot with the same moving blocks of text and imagery and a slightly different message...yet still is a call to action for the viewer to get up and do something to help the world! The fact that he is arguing that the music is similar is ridiculous as well, since piano music has been around forever, and is commonly used in "inspiring" messages such as this...and what a coincidence that the GirlEffect website has similar music as well!
David Hauser needs to realize that when you decide to use a popular style of execution in current advertising to talk about an extremely general topic there is bound to be some overlap, and just because an ad discusses that same GENERAL topic does not mean that its a blantant rip-off of your work.