MTN and Jupiter Drawing Room miss the mark

I don’t think there is a person I don’t know who doesn’t like the new MTN advertising campaign. Based largely on User Generated Content (UGC) they depict the social and viral aspects of our times and they’re very entertaining.

The major problem is most of their adverts are simply copied or pulled directly from YouTube which pisses me off.

Does Jupiter Drawing Room not have anything more creative in them than stealing concepts from the directors at YouTube? What, oh what, does MTN pay them millions of Rands for?

Here’s an example:

OK Go – Here It Goes Again – Views: 18,903,842

Look familiar? Well that’s not the only one. I know I’ve seen the “Hadaway – What is love” video on YouTube which has the two black guys miming the song in their flat and I also know that the SMS video clip where a guy writes an SMS on a piece of paper and it travels across the city to his friend was also a ripoff from YouTube.

I would have found these two clips but unfortunately I don’t get paid to search the web for concepts to steal.

I’m perplexed and in my honest opinion MTN and Jupiter Drawing Room have simply missed the mark. I love the notion that they decided to incorporate UGC into their campaign but clearly they didn’t realise that they should now go out and create their own UGC.

I knew I should have been an Ad-exec…

UPDATE: Further to this initial gripe I have read on various websites that in fact none of the MTN ads are original. It appears, if you believe the other sources from Bizcommunity, that ever single piece of content was created by someone else and Jupiter have pulled this from various sources to use as there own. Maybe I’m missing the mark here but I would love to hear some feedback from Jupiter on this issue.