So, everyone remember the Billboard Magazine kickass Cannes Grand Prix winning "Icons" ads, where the images of famous musicians would be made with red, yellow, blue and black images of other musicians? Yeah, it was tres clever, especially the little photo booths where you could get one of these images made from a photo of you.

Kind have an itch to scratch here. It reminds me a tad of the Spiegel campaign from DDB Dusseldorf made in 2006. Hundreds of wee icons would make the images of Bush, Mao and the iconic portrait of Che - little bombs, oil drills, that sort of thing.

Just me? Either way, they're still a little different.

Well lookie here what Buttonmasher dug up from their forums and passed on to Agencyspy. Mon-Tage Twins!

In the NZ version corner we have comedian Dai Henwood calling out "Mon Tage" and the clip ends with a headbanging hardrocker raising hell and confetti with his electic guitar riff.... In the US version from Deutsch LA, we have Kevin Butler delivering the "Mon Tage" line before explosions and action lead us to the headbanging hardrocker dude and his riff in the confetti.

Yeah. Twins. Told ya.

See?

We've done this before , discussed album covers that look like other album covers, and as it turned out the genre of twin album covers never end. There are homages, there are spoofs, there are weird coincidences and then there's the really obvious. Hanson mimicking The Ramones on a Ramones tribute album. Yeah, it's not a Badlander, thanks for the tip tho.

The most ironic moment in Cannes during the festival was when me and French Badland King Joelapompe are strolling down the Croisette and we see these ads. Conversation goes a little like this;

- Look at that, Joe says, copy-cat ads. Like "Joelapompe". I bet they even took the images from my site.
- That's totally been done before as far as I recall. For Xerox, too.
- Yes, it has, I have it at home. I can make a post.
- I don't like the line. "If you make a copy, copy right". Pun!

Then it was simply a race to who would post it first. Joelapompe won - but in my defense he left a whole day earlier than I did. ;)

MoFilm has invited the original "Forrest Gump in one minute" director to the London Film Festival, as the guest of MOFILM and the One Minute One Take film will be shown during the MOFILM London Film Festival ceremony.

We would like apologise unreservedly once more for this error. We didn’t realise that the film that we chose was a copy, we would have instantly removed the submission from the competition if we had. As it stands, the original winner has now had their prizes revoked and we will be announcing a new winner soon.

The New Epson campaign from Ogilvy Paris has a lovely portrait of an aged lady, where the lines in her face seem to be actual lines of text, each line telling the story of her life. Epson signs off with "long live memories", with tiny white script in the right hand corner, sits back and likely waits for the awards. The image is currently showing up on various shortlists, this is the season.

But the awards will not come. Because Dove already did this. With the same image. The same discreet white script, then stating "Love Your Life", and - here's the kicker - produced by the same agency. Yes, Ogilvy Paris did that one too, you can view it in Lürzers Archive [4.0813 ]. Back in 2008 this ad was good enough to see the light of day at Lürzers and various adfests, however, little birdies tell me that Dove have not seen nor signed off on this ad.

Which may explain why Ogilvy Paris tried again and re-used it for Epson. Photos cost money youknow, these days we're squeezing blood out of rocks to make ends meet. Careful you don't squeeze true creativity to death while you're at it.

Take a bow JoeLaPompe.

Copywriters get to have final word on how exactly something should be said in any given ad, that is until the ASA listens to it. This British Gas advert which aired in December last year has been banned for "Implying that British Gas would attend same day call-outs, even over Christmas". The phrasing that set complaints off was : "You can reach us every day. Even over Christmas.", in combo with a cute animated British Gas car pulling up to help the house owner in the ad with the broken boiler.
British gas disputed the complaint, saying that they wanted the ad to show that they deal with queries every day, even on christmas - thing is, the british gas truck doesn't show up quite as fast as the ad implies.