Estrella and McCann sell nuts by ripping off Geoffrey Cottenceaus "Animaux" visuals

We've seen Badlanded ads that copied art before. Toshiba's "space chair" looked like Simon Faithfull's escape vehicles, Forever21's billboard looked like "hand from above", Honda Cog was a bit too close to Der Lauf Der Dinge, and in selling art the billboard art was imitating art, not to forget that these condom ads inspired by "head shots" (and later gamefaces). Yup. So here we go again, selling nuts in Sweden and Norway by way of a Swiss artists visual expression.

It's artist Geoffrey Cottenceaus "Animaux" series that clearly has inspired Estrellas campaign for assorted nuts. McCann Norway who created the campaign have admitted to Dagens Media that they have never contacted the artist. Now the campaign is running in Sweden as well, and still nobody has spoken to Geoffrey Cottenceaus. Crazy, right? Nuts, even. (Pun!)

The client, Estrella, were unaware of the artists prior work when Dagens Media contacted Robert Grenmark and asked "Aren't you partially responsible?"

"We have some responsibility as clients, but we were shown images that we thought looked good, and assumed that [the agency] had been in touch with the artist"

When Dagens Media first phoned McCann Norways Paal Tarjei Aasheim, he seemed to think that the artist wouldn't mind, their quite reads;

-" As long as you don't phone up the artist and tell him, there's no worries, the images are all over the internet already"

He later retracted his statement and admits that the agency should have contacted the artist and that they regret not having done so.