Hasta La Creative!

Anyway, so the cinematographer is waiting and waiting as the line slowly inches forward, but he’s not all that tweaked out, since, hey! he’s going to heaven.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a black mercedes S600 V12 comes screeching to a fishtailing halt right outside the gates, the door opens and a pompous ass in all black clothing (and sunglasses to match) pops out.
He slams the door, strides confidently to the front of the line, tosses the car keys to Saint Peter (who barely catches them) and turns around to look at the line. He pulls down his sunglasses and stands there.
“Great… Really great… Keep it up!” he says patting Saint Peter on the back before turning on his heel and whizzing right through the gates before anyone can say (or even think) a word.

This is finally too much for our cinematographer friend, who, despite the risk of eternal damnation, loses his cool and runs screaming at Saint Peter.

“Great!” says the cinematographer, “I bust my ass my whole life… working on sets, making the film look great, taking all the crap from the idiot clients and the spineless director and finally I’m dead, and I had a good life… was a good man, and I get here to the pearly gates and I’m waiting and waiting with everybody else.. following the rules… And why? For what?”

“It’s just the same up here. The asshole director shows up at the last minute, doesn’t stand in line and goes flying through the pearly gates without so much as a word from you, and no body even stops him or tells him to stand in line with the rest of us… This is a load of shit!”

Saint Peter, shrugs with an embarrassed smile and explains… “Oh no… I’m sorry… you don’t understand… that’s not a director… that’s God. He just thinks he’s a director.”

Creatives Lauren Rogers and Rich Tseng made WheresMyFuckingIdea.com, which can shake you out of creative rut. Presumably. It’ll give you answers like Break a fucking taboo, and show how this product could do some fucking good. I cycled through these and find some more could be useful, like;
Recycle a fucking previous award winner
Parody a fucking popular meme
Fuck the brief, use the same fucking concept you’ve tried to push on 5 other clients
Hire a fucking celebrity comedian and use the outtakes

The creatives are working allowing submissions, so perhaps we’ll see suggestions like that in the fucking future. While they have 30 ideas now, they want to add more and seem to think you’ll find it useful to shake things up.

“Being struck by an even better idea after the deadline’s passed is the worst. And this hopefully prevents that in a fun yet quick way.” says Rich Tseng (Copywriter of the team)

“We wanted to make something people could actually use. Give creatives ways in to help push their ideas further, even spark methods nobody’s thought of yet.” adds Lauren Rogers (Art Director of the team)

Rich and Lauren have just left TBWAChiatDay LA, where they used Twitter to hijack the Super Bowl for Persil ProClean, and are looking for new opportunities together. Here at Adland we’ve had an Ad Chat with Richard a few years ago.

But that just means it wasn’t Sagmeister & Walsh’s stunt. Aye?

Either way, with Sagmeister & Walsh themselves tweeting this, it was easy for some people to overlook the .info ending of the domain and read the story about their “work” getting stolen by brazen thieves. Even if the first reply to Sagmeister’s tweet is “Riiiiight”.
We are deeply saddened by this loss. Next time take the printer. http://t.co/g3J5gY7odt— Sagmeister & Walsh (@sagmeisterwalsh) April 16, 2015

Adweek posted don’t call NYPD just yet (oh c’mon, play it straight, man) but basically the cynical adgrunt consensus out there was that they weren’t falling for it.

Now, Jessica Walsh from Sagmeister & Walsh has tweeted the real Creative Review story link of the stunt, which was actually created by Barcelona-based creative studio achos.
The story behind the guys who stole our work 🙂 @achosbarcelona http://t.co/RF6drvr2QZ— jessicawalsh (@jessicawalsh) April 21, 2015

Achos tells Creative Review that this stunt grew out of the concept of Creative Thieves: “a concept that sums up our ways of thinking and doing. We are the generation of the future. There’s no shortage of new and eager creative people coming out with new ideas, new things to talk about. Sooner or later, this younger generation will end up ‘stealing’ the work, so to speak, of the industry giants of today.”

So how successful was their little hoax? Industry reactions range from eye-rolling to calling them “irritating” or “Brilliant” – but a quick glance around the headlines shows a slight disadvantage to this type of tactic….. The name Sagmeister & Walsh is repeated more often than Achos. While it’s nice to see Achos next to Sagmeister & Walsh, hopefully getting a little borrowed interest glory here, Achos now really has their work cut out for them in order to separate themselves from Sagmeister & Walsh and this stunt in the mind of their clients and peers.

One thing that is really impressive about this, is the attention to detail. Achos looked for a space with similar proportion as Sagmeister & Walsh’s studio and recreated it so that they could make the robbery images. Attention to tiny details, like which terrible printer is in the studio, is a must in this business. Little things, like which topic this is posted under, matter.

More news on the stunt: Booooooom “How to get noticed: Steal from Sagmeister & Walsh” and Agencyspy: Sagmeister & Walsh robbery was a stunt.