MattCreamer.com

I spent three days last week trying to track down rumors that Wal-Mart’s new ad campaign, created by an agency selected in January following a review, was something of a composite of strategies and ideas created by agencies who lost the review. In this story in today’s Ad Age, I concluded that the tagline was created by a long-term incumbent on the account, GSD&M, after they said as much to me in a statement. Wal-Mart, unsurprisingly, said it was no big deal, because the new tag is actually based on an old Sam Walton quote and pretty closely reflected the company’s brand positioning as it was laid out to the finalist agencies. So it wasn’t exactly Grand Theft Advert, but it was nevertheless an amusing coda to the seemingly never-ending Wal-Mart review saga.

What was probably most interesting about this story was the discovery that reporting on intellectual-property issues as they relate to advertising can be something of a rabbit hole. Ideas typically don’t have clear provenances. That’s especially so in marketing–which even in the best cases–stitches together existing memes from pop and business cultures. So the story I ended up with was nothing like story I thought I had–that some of the losing agencies had legitimate claims that their IP rights were  violated–once I got deep into the reporting.