Tuesday 18 August 2009

Sony Ericsson's SMAA and the theft of ideas

SMEBS Watch - Meet Andrew from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This was a really funny thing that Marcus did a few months ago - it's part of his campaign to warn about the dangers of Social Media Expert Burnout Syndrome (S.M.E.B.S.), which was also tied up in the Tweetreading phenomenon - now lots of us spend far too much time getting far too excited about the next big thing in our day jobs, and stuff like this pulls apart the pomposity of it all, which is why it makes me laugh. Out loud. A lot. And why I thought that there was something familiar about the Sony Ericsson campaign for the SMAA (Social Media Addicts Association.... see any similarities yet?)


There's more of this stuff at http://stopwritingonmywall.com/index.html, which is worth a look, as some of it actually uses whole chunks of Marcus's stuff. The agency behind this is Nascom in Belgium. Hopefully Copyc*nts will pick up on this soon, because it is one thing borrowing ideas from movies or TV shows, which are popular enough for viewers to understand how an idea references another idea. It is a totally different thing to steal ideas that have been shared around small groups of people and pass them off as your own when selling them on to major brands. Nascom call themselves a digital agency on their website, but they miss the most basic truth about the internet: everything is about reputation. Linking and referencing builds reputation. Steal and lose it.

UPDATE - @minorissues and @jannikolaas of Nascom reply to Marcus's version of events

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