The flight of originality
By Paul Ugoagwu
Thursday, April 5, 2007

As a young copywriter working in a tiny agency off Allen Avenue in Lagos, I was fascinated by the brilliant works coming from the big agencies. The copies looked perfect. The visuals were breathtaking. Overall layout was world class. Repeatedly I wondered, how did they pull it off? My boss didn’t make things any easier. Whenever he wanted to get at me, he would turn to his senior colleague and ask, “Ike, did you see that work from XYZ agency? It’s brilliant! Then he would turn to me: “why can’t you write a copy like that?”

Well, I wondered too. And so did many copywriters my age and experience. What was the magic? Week after week, these geniuses came out with award winners that left you gaping and dreaming. When would I be a master? The existence of these whiz kids and their work however kept hope alive. If someone out there was doing it, we would get there. All we needed was time.

The ugly truth came one day when I was leafing through an old edition of Ebony magazine. The first ad I saw knocked the gas out of me. It was that of a lease company. I looked again. The copy and the visual was exactly the same thing one of the big agencies used for a local client in Nigeria. Word for word, copy for copy, visual for visual, the Nigerian agency had shamelessly copied this ad. The only change was the company name and the brand colours. I stood stunned and speechless. With the copy of the magazine in my hand, I staggered into my creative director’s office and threw it on his table, too shocked to verbalize my stupefaction. The man, an ex art director from one of the big agencies looked at the magazine and then at me, his eyes telling me he didn’t see any breaking news item there. I managed to remain sane as I respectfully pointed out what I had just discovered: The brilliant work I was commending, purportedly created by the big agency, was a shameless act of plagiarism. They simply dubbed it. He looked up at me and said “So? What’s the point?” If I was shocked when I saw the creative thievery, I was completely numbed by his reply. I blurted out: “But this is wrong! It’s stealing. It’s piracy. It’s plagiarism! It’s not their idea at all. They stole it! Everything!”

My oga looked at me with an expression of “are you this naïve?” Then he asked quietly, “Are you surprised? This means you haven’t been reading foreign magazines. This is where all the brilliant ideas come from. If I were you, I would start reworking some of them for that brief on your table. Don’t kill yourself on this job. Just see what you can carefully adapt.” With that he went back to his drawing. I noticed for the first time that he himself was adapting a layout from another foreign magazine!

Adapt! I was so sickened that I closed early that day. The implication of what I had stumbled on was staggering. Just a few weeks before, I had been privileged to attend a creative award where the prizes were swept by two agencies, one of them being the guilty company which copied the leasing ad. Did it then mean that agencies were now using performance enhancing sharp practices to win awards, just like the athletes addicted to anabolic steroids? My God, what if the client found out?!

Fifteen years later, the practice of copying foreign ads had worsened. I spend some time in South Africa last year. When I came back, I was shocked to see an ad for an oil company shamelessly adapted for a bank in Nigeria. The ad is the talk of the town here and I won’t be surprised if it wins an award in the next creative competition. Again, I ask myself, what if the ad ran on DSTV? What would the South African creative community think of us? Okay, sowhat if this agency sweeps all the prizes at stake in the Nigerian creative award, but would the agnecy dare enter any of them for an international award?
I know of a big ad agency in Nigeria whose specialty is just that. The plagiarism culture is so strong there that it is spearheaded by no less a person than the managing director. He travels personally to South Africa to get all the creative archival materials for his major pitches. He tells his creative staff, “don’t waste any time on this brief. Just dub.”

I doubt if I would ever get over this shock. But one colleague explained it this way: “Relax Paul. Even dubbing requires some creativity. You need to know which idea fits. You also need to know which idea has been dubbed in Nigeria before. You also need to pray that the client had not seen the idea somewhere before.” Ah! This is crazy!

Here’s another one. Two years ago, someone was praising one of our office assistant’s industry. (He’s been fired now). I was told he was not only diligent at his job but he also made some money on the side by writing stories for Nollywood. Wow! An office assistant (euphemism for messenger) writes for Nollywood? That is a good movie story in itself. But when one day when I visited the office on a Saturday, I discovered how he wrote his Nollywood stories. Our office assistant was watching a foreign film and carefully transcribing the story for Nollywood! Talk about industry! No wonder some of the home video stories look pretty familiar.

One colleague of mine has given up. His words: “It has gotten so bad now that whenever I see a piece of brilliant work, I immediately think that this must be a clever fake. I don’t trust our creative people anymore.”

Another colleague sees it differently: “There is no such thing as an original work. God is the only original creator. The rest of us are just copycats. When was the last time you listened to an original music? When was the last time you saw an original work of art? Look at the cars being manufactured today. They all look alike. Same aero-dynamic shapes. There are no original designs anymore.”

It’s terrible isn’t it? It is also very confusing. You can’t tell what is fake or genuine anymore. You don’t know when to appreciate or scuff at a piece of advertising. When you applaud one, you don’t know who is really being applauded – the original author or the thief who brought it to Nigeria. And when you criticize it, you don’t know who should get the lion share of the blame – the guy who did the original poor job or the guy, who in the process of “adapting” it, killed it completely.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked at all. My theory is always that whatever is happening to advertising is a reflection of our larger society. It is hard to find a university student who has written an original thesis. Just as finding a true first class graduate is getting impossible. Drugs are being faked. There are fake notes. Fake certificates exist. These were all carefully adapted, just like the ads we were talking about.

Where do we start? As I learnt the ropes in the profession, I knew that original creativity takes time. It takes discipline. It takes a lot of concentration. I found that there is really no short cut to a good work. I began to see a similarity between a woman in the kitchen and the creative person. You need the right ingredients. You need the skills to put them together.

You need the right kind of stove, the right temperature, the right pot and the right amount of time. But when dubbing of foreign ads is championed by owners of agencies and promoted to the level of culture, it looks as if all that our heroes past have laboured for is about to be in vain. And who cares? The clients who pay a fortune to re-shoot what others have produced on foreign shores can’t all claim ignorance. The creative directors who eagerly encourage their subordinates to dub with care know what they stand to gain. One thing is sure though: Copying foreign ads is like the menace posed by fake drugs. Although it gives the faker an opportunity to make easy win and profits, not having invested anything worthwhile in the process; it gradually but surely kills the industry. Although NAFDAC is doing a fantastic job of stopping fake drugs, the issue of fake advertising is one war they cannot fight, or ever hope to win.