This campaign is brilliant. Absolut has done so many great ads that there’s a coffee table book devoted just to one series. No matter how cool an Absolut ad is the chances of anyone noticing are next to nil. So this brilliant guy comes along, blatantly riffs on Sagmeister, while Sagmeister is surfing in Indonesia, with an ad about being different. And every design geek on Earth gets incensed and demands that everyone stop and look at what Absolut is doing. And for the next year the design police will be blogging about every Absolut promotion in relation to this scandal. The only sad thing is how many designers don’t realize that they’re being manipulated by advertising—am I the only one who went to an art school that made a semester of critical thinking part off the curriculum?

Seems like a contrived article.

No matter how cool an Absolut ad is the chances of anyone noticing are next to nil.

I’m not so sure of that, James. I noticed their ads during the 90s, when they would appear in WIRED magazine... They weren’t ripping off artists then, they were working with them, and hiring them to do ads! (This Keith Haring ad is from the 80s, but you get the point.)

I’m not saying that controversy doesn’t generate publicity or word-of-mouth (think Benetton), but plagiarizing an artist’s work (any artist’s, not just Sagmeister) could backfire against them... I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot here.

And every design geek on Earth gets incensed and demands that everyone stop and look at what Absolut is doing.

I’m not sure we’re that influential... :-)

I think that they still are working with an artist. But this time it’s an artist who knows how to really toy with his audience. It’s like Hirst sticking dead animals into tanks of preservative and selling it to the gullible nouveau riche just so people will argue about whether or not a dead shark in a glass box is art and how much the price tag has to do with the definition.

Frankly I don’t see the problem with Absolut’s ad. Exploring creating type out of found materials or experimenting with type in nature is hardly patented by Sagmeister nor does he have a copyright on the idea. If Absolut had stolen or ripped off his work, fine, I get it, but they didn’t. Maybe the author was inspired by Sagmeister’s work, maybe the designer was inspired by something else (hell, we’ve done type in food experiments here on typophile, does that make us rip off artists too?), but there was no theft involved here. If anything, maybe it is an homage to Sagmeister’s work and how different his work is from everyone else. Who knows?

Both videos comprise sentences with words formed from raw materials in a variety of environments.
I don’t think it’s possible to say whether or not plagiarism is involved.

(You could trace the “each sequential shot is a word in a sentence” concept back to the Pennebaker 1965 “video” of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, or earlier. I made a film a bit like that in 1974, with a number of people each saying a word in sequence.)

However, when a creative comes up with something that bears a strong resemblance to well-known currently fashionable/popular work, even if there is no plagiarism involved, it’s best to kill that baby, for the sake of reputation.

But if the “second man in” already has a substantial reputation, or both have equal reputations, they are not so likely to get called on it.

It happens in type design...

But this time it’s an artist who knows how to really toy with his audience.

Is everyone in said audience a graphic designer? Or familiar with Stefan Sagmeister? I’m sure plenty of Absolut vodka drinkers out there are not graphic designers, or are even aware of Sagmeister’s work. So how will this impact those members of the audience?

As I implied earlier, if this ad is courting controversy, its creator(s) did not aim for the largest possible audience. So, I still think they lamely copied a concept by someone whose work they admire, and now someone noticed, and they (the agency) look bad, and their client (Absolut Vodka) will, too. Nothing brilliant about it.

And speaking of Sagmeister and slavish imitation, I think this is absolutely brilliant. :-)