Today in Friday Dump, the trolls are pissed.
We know not all redditors are serial harassers and that “shower thoughts” is one of the least (potentially) offensive pages on the whole property. But fans of the group in question seem to think that Axe has ripped them off mightily with its “Shower Thoughts” campaign, which launched last month. Of course they’re wrong; the similarity between the two ideas is purely coincidental.
Here’s the first spot starring everyone’s favorite diminutive b-baller Muggsy Bogues.
As reddit user Sleepy_time_wit_taco put it, “AXE” is jacking our shower thoughts and not giving credit. Literally word for word.”
OK, so which agency made the work? From AdFreak:
“Generate, a division of digital content studio Defy Media, created the ad with Mindshare Entertainment, the branded content arm of media buying agency Mindshare.”
That sentence felt more complicated than it had to be. A new ad launched yesterday:
That one doesn’t seem to be a direct case of theft, but maybe it stemmed from this thought: “There should be a video website for tuba players called YouTuba.” There’s also a separate subreddit dedicated to all things tuba, “The Original Heavy Metal Instrument.” But why did it have to be a scrawny white dude playing the horn?
We might mention that most of the jokes on reddit–and most jokes in general–are not exactly original and that the first spot encourages viewers to “claim [this shower thought] as your own” even though the bros who might do so obviously didn’t come up with it. It’s kind of like The Most Interesting Man in the World.
And most of the comments in the linked thread are like…we did not invent this concept, duh.
But you know how the hive mind works, and the campaign has already earned a lot of bad press for Axe. Wait for it to disappear just like last week’s blatant Tim and Eric ripoff, which came to us for a short time courtesy of Cheez-It.
The first YouTube video currently has about 30 times as many downvotes as upvotes. And as Sir Martin Sorrell tells us, advertising is really all about the numbers.