Hasta La Creative!

Don’t say Twitter isn’t good for anything. Earlier this week we came across a tweet from U.K.-based animator Cyriak Harris that appears to depict a McDonald’s ad next to a video made by Harris.

The similarity between the two is quite striking.

Wonder how much @McDonalds paid someone to copy my video. I didn’t even get paid to make the original pic.twitter.com/XGWjHQq0j6

— cyriak harris (@cyriakharris) August 2, 2016

We reached out to Harris, whose work has appeared in ads for Coca-Cola, Trident and others over the past few years.

He wrote, “At this point all I know is that there is a video on the internet that appears to be a McDonald’s advert, which is clearly based on one of my own videos. It was brought to my attention on twitter, including a link to a forum thread supposedly by the creative behind the advert, where I was cited as the ‘reference.’”

Here’s the original video, which went live in 2010 and has more than 35 million YouTube views. Harris described it as “surreal bovine choreography.”

He also sent us the link mentioned above.

It leads to a tech forum in which Leandro Pedrouzo — who is co-owner of Buenos Aires production company Juan Solo — wrote three days ago that the Harris clip was “the reference for this Spot,” adding, “The director and I wanted to go a bit more realistic but the client loved the ref.”

The ad was run by Arcos Dorados, the Latin American version of McDonald’s, with creative by Sao Paulo, Brazil agency DPZ&T.

The agency hasn’t responded to an email we sent this morning, but they did get back to USA Today after Arcos Dorados took the ad down (BuzzFeed U.K. also covered the story yesterday). An agency representative pretty much denied the ripoff, claiming that the Harris clip was used “with numerous other works as a reference for the production of the spot” and that this is common practice in the ad industry.

The spokesperson then acknowledged that the clips were similar and promised that the production house would respond to Harris’s claims.

Today Harris told us that neither Juan Solo nor McDonald’s has gotten back to him. He wrote, “That’s not unusual for me, but it is quite unusual to be copied so directly like that.”