Despite a rocky beginning with those weird Jerry Seinfeld commercials, locally based agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky has continued to handle advertising for tech giant Microsoft. You might remember last year's ads peddling Microsoft's Windows 7 line of phones by highlighting Americans' addiction to their smartphones. Particularly, you might remember one in which a man sits glued to his cell phone while a lingerie-clad woman tries to get his attention. Yeah, well, now Microsoft and CP+B are being sued for ripping off the idea.
Here's the Microsoft ad:
Here's an ad for Cellrderm, a novelty gag gift, produced by a Boca Raton-based company, that amounts to fake patches to ween cell-phone addicts from their tech addiction. It was uploaded to YouTube about a year before Microsoft's was.
CP+B and Microsoft may have left the prodigious manboobs from their version, but the commercials do seem pretty similar, right down to the black silk negligee.
"The Microsoft commercials copy both the sequence of events and the character interplay found in the Cellrderm Commercials," reads the lawsuit, according to Adweek. "The Microsoft commercials also copy other copyrightable expression, including but not limited to clothing, gestures, character appearance, camera angles, and other visual elements from the Cellrderm commercials."
Cellrderm also claims another CP+B/Microsoft ad, featuring a man dropping his phone in a urinal, resembles its other YouTube ad.
Microsoft and CP+B declined to comment when asked by Adweek.
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