Melting Ice Men - is researching art worthy of an ad award?

A little birdie emailed me a good question last night: ...would this be worthy of an ad award for ad creativity?  Reward the ad 'creatives' who found the artist and put the cause to it?  - gee when you put it that way it seems like a no.
Has it really become the norm as the Director of the copy-catted "Sorry I'm Late" stop motion film Tony Manonsky said: It feels like some creatives should get the title "researchers" as they sit and scan the web for ideas that they can sell to clients.

See, around a year ago Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo’s was making ice Sculptures of 'Melting Men' and placing them where people would photograph and blog about it.
Check Believe it or not's post dated August 2008 and now we find the same ice sculptures doing their melting for WWF. (course, nobody noticed they were so busy talking about that 911 stuff).

Ice sculptures in the shape of humans are placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin September 2, 2009. Hosted by the German World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 1,000 ice sculptures made by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo were positioned on the steps in the German capital at noon, to highlight climate change in the arctic region. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

See The Toronto Sun, Yahoo news in pictures the Telegraph UK and countless others (not to forget blogs Make The Logo Bigger, DognPony etc.)