7 Billion People, 3 Videos and Some Dubious Imitation
June 22nd, 2008, 4 Comments »
About a year ago (as I wrote here), Capulet helped produce and promote a series of videos for Elastic Path, an eCommerce company in Vancouver. They were called “The Crazy Messed Up World of eCommerce”, and asked the question “What if offline shopping were as cruel and difficult as buying online?”. Here’s one of the videos:
Last week, I received an email discussing a series of three videos that another eCommerce company, 7 Billion People, had released and showed at an industry tradeshow. You can see them on the front page of their website, or in their YouTube channel. They claim to ask the question “What if all shopping was like shopping on the web?”. Here’s one of their videos:
Does that seem oddly familiar to anybody else? Let’s see–same format, same setup, same comedic premise, similar dialogue. Their videos are obviously a lot slicker–they have professional actors and, you know, lighting, but I think the similarities are pretty striking. Too striking to be a mere coincidence.
I’m obviously not an objective observer. But it sure looks like they saw the Elastic Path videos and, without acknowledgement, blatantly ripped off the idea. What do you think?