The advertising industry spends as much time on sites like YouTube and Vimeo looking for inspiration as they do complaining about how lazy everyone has become because of it. There are countless examples of ads that has clearly ripped off existing content but the discussions has been concerned with whether it’s OK or not to ‘be inspired’ by it or if ‘stealing’ is creative.

Since we find solving problems more intriguing than discussing what causes them we spent some time thinking about this. Is there a way to acknowledge the original work of the artists? To create more relevant communications for our clients? To spend less money on redoing something that already has been done?

In the video above, it is impossible not to think about Nintendo, about the hours you’ve spent with Tetris, with the classic soundtrack in your ears and that heavy Gameboy in your hands. This animation is advertising Nintendo whether the creator likes it or not. Traditionally some creatives working on Nintendo would see that the clip had been viewed 125 000 times and think that redoing it would be an excellent idea because it’s already been proven to work.

But what if we could let the clip be as it is; relevant, engaging and original, and then endorse it by paying the animator for the rights and by sponsoring his Vimeo page. We would smack a logo onto the page rather than on the end of the clip. By doing this we would support creative people, we would endorse content relevant to the brand and we get content that has already been proven to have a ‘viral’ effect.

What do you think?