The poster campaign won the Grand Prix last week, but immediately walked into a storm of controversy after people noticed its similarity to a cartoon by Larson. Both the ad and the cartoon show the honeycomb perspective of a fly and say "The last thing a fly sees before it dies".
The press and outdoor category had already been dogged by a "scam ad" scandal, when it emerged that the poster that had been in line to win the Grand Prix, created by Leo Burnett Lisbon for a bookshop, did not run in paid-for media and was therefore not eligible to be entered. Instead, TBWA\Paris Boulogne-Billancourt scooped the Grand Prix for a PlayStation2 ad showing a woman giving birth to a fully grown man
Jury president Dan Wieden ruled, however, that the award to Grey Auckland would stand because the jury was unaware of the plagiarism claim at the time of voting. Previously, one of the creatives who worked on the ad, Todd McCraken, claimed that the ad was based on a well-known joke in Australia and New Zealand. The joke goes:
What's the last thing a fly sees when it hits your windscreen?
Its arse.
The issue of originality was the hot topic of the year, replacing the question of scam advertising which plagued last year's festival. At the centre of the controversy was Wieden & Kennedy's "cog" ad for Honda. Although the ad was widely acclaimed for being groundbreaking in the field of automotive advertising, it was criticised for borrowing heavily from a 1987 art film created by two Swiss artists.
In the end, it did not win the Film Grand Prix, which instead went to the US agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky's "lamp" ad for Ikea, directed by Spike Jonze.
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