We got in touch with Todd Riddle, Group Creative Director at Fallon about the current Travelers commercial that bears a striking resemblance to Katamari Damacy. The spot (high-quality version) in question shows a mass enveloping people, trees, and cars, as it bounces through San Francisco. Riddle said that there's no Katamari relation, but the spot is connected to Peter Jackson's special effects house.Riddle has been in advertising for 20 years and has won of dozens of accolades including Cannes, Clio, and One Show awards. We asked him a few questions about games and the spot, titled "Snowball," via email.
What inspired the Travelers Snowball spot?
The creative team that created the ad decided to use the metaphor that life is dynamic and can sometimes snowball -- but if you have the proper insurance, you should be just fine. Often in advertising we'll present a detailed storyboard to a client. In this case, because the visual production would be so detailed, and we weren't exactly sure how we would be able to produce it -- so we presented a single "key frame" that was reminiscent of the old cartoons of characters rolling down a hill, snowballing with everything in their path, and told the client that if the bought the concept, we would find the best people in the world to execute it.
How did the production of the ad come together?
True to our promise, we found the best partners. We worked with Weta Digital Ltd., which is Peter Jackson's Academy Award-winning special effects company based in New Zealand, and a well known commercial director, Dante Ariola from MJZ (Los Angeles). The special effects were created by Weta, the same team that did King Kong (Universal Pictures) and the Lord of The Rings trilogy (New Line Cinema). For the in-camera scenes (meaning scenes that do not require computer graphics), we hired a five-person stunt crew and filmed them as they intertwined themselves intro a human ball and rolled themselves down the sidewalk in San Francisco, forming the base for the "snowball." It took over 12 weeks and 87 people to complete the computer graphics (CG) and post-production work.
Do you play games? Is the spot related to Katamari Damacy?
No. In fact it wasn't until recently that we had even heard of the game.
Have games inspired your other work?
Not personally yet, though I do think the gaming world is becoming much more mainstream as technology is more accessible, and I would imagine it will at some point. But I would add our interactive department created a website for Travelers -- which is part of this campaign called the "In-synch Challenge," which recently won the Most Influential Flash Site of The Year for 2006 at the Favourite Website Awards in conjunction with Adobe. It's worth checking out.
[See also: Real life Katamari in Travelers Insurance ad]
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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They did give credit, if you actually read. Quote: "we presented a single "key frame" that was reminiscent of the old cartoons of characters rolling down a hill, snowballing with everything in their path".
I'm quite sure Katamari gave credit to that very same idea as well, somewhere..
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Katamari is not a unique, original concept. Get over it.
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"Katamari is not a unique, original concept. Get over it."
Just wanted to point that out. I agree totally. I remember all those old Warner cartoons where a very tiny cosmic Prince would come to earth at the behest of his drunken father, the King of the Cosmos (complete with disco look at massive bulge) and then proceed to attach things to his katamari, building a huge ball of junk to reignite the stars.
Yes, I distinctly remember that cartoon. How dare Katamari be such a unoriginal and derivite concept!
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I'm totally calling bullshit on this. If there's one thing overpaid egomaniacal ad agency people love (especially at an agency as big as Fallon), it's their pop culture "knowledge." There's no way in hell SOMEONE along the chain of command didn't know this was a total Katamari ripoff/homage/whatever. Just admit it, people!
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"Yes, we got the idea when we saw an intern playing Katamari on her portable thingy. We sincerely hope Namco will be nice and all and not sue. Or say bad things about us. Thank you. xoxo"
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Every one of these guys except maybe the one or two people they were pitching the idea to is lying through their teeth to limit any sort of legal consequences. I'm even willing to bet they were coerced into deny any links to Katamari Damacy, by having their very employment threatened if they acknowledged it.
Yes, there are examples of such things (both snowballing and not) from previous sources, but the decision to use this particular effect was made solely to ride the coattails of a current fad. It's no different from things like the "lunchables" ads that use anime styled characters to hock their products.
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Katamari Damacy is not that big of a success. It the darling of game media, but sales in North America weren't that spectacular. Sales were decent, but it's certainly not a mainstream phenomenon.
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If you really "loved Katamari", you'd show it enough respect to not sound like a raving fanboy making idle threats at commercials.
"Here we are in the 21st century, and I think we could be doing a lot more if we used our minds to move forward, rather than keep dwelling on who owns what."
- Keita Takahashi
Amen to that.
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Posted at 8:33PM on Sep 28th 2006 by Probot "
QFT
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Posted at 10:52PM on Sep 28th 2006 by Cynders "
No it's not. You can't copyright an idea, like something snowballing down a hill. Only the implementation of it.
(I think, at least)
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Just a coincidence...
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It doesn't matter how successful the game was with the general public. We're talking about professionals specific to the same industry that game developers serve. (Multimedia and Entertainment)
If such people are ignorant to the trends present in their industry, how can they honestly market themselves as being "professionals"? You don't spend millions to create content without knowing if your target audience will be receptive to it.
Somehow, I doubt those likely to buy this company's insurance based on this ad alone are also the type that conveniently happen to be fans of all the pre-1950's cartoons that used this effect to the point of rendering it a cliché. Not even Cartoon Network's sister channel, Boomerang, shows these cartoons anymore.
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Alternatively, we could just have a case of Newton and Leibniz...genius sometimes comes independently to two people at roughly the same point in human history. And believe me, a game about rolling stuff into a giant ball is some sort of peculiar, wondeful genius.
--Branewalker
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"We're talking about professionals specific to the same industry that game developers serve."
Can you clarify how this American ad agency is the core audience of this Japanese game developer?
"If such people are ignorant to the trends present in their industry, how can they honestly market themselves as being 'professionals'?"
How exactly is this ad agency part of the game industry? And how do you consider one cult hit the basis for their professionalism?
"You don't spend millions to create content without knowing if your target audience will be receptive to it."
There is nothing wrong with the ad agency not knowing about Katamari Damacy. That game does not affect their core audience in any significant way.
"Somehow, I doubt those likely to buy this company's insurance based on this ad alone are also the type that conveniently happen to be fans of all the pre-1950's cartoons that used this effect to the point of rendering it a cliché. Not even Cartoon Network's sister channel, Boomerang, shows these cartoons anymore."
The snowball effect is not based on those cartoons. Surprisingly, it's actually based on snowballs. See, when a small ball of snow gets rolling down a hill, it actually sticks to loose snow on the ground, and that makes the ball get bigger. This "snowball effect" is how snowmen are made. For more clarification, find the nearest 5 year old and they'll explain it to you.
That is the basis for the ad. The guy interviewed mentioned the cartoons because it's an example of where one might find the "snowball effect," in addiction, of course, to actual snowballs.
I'm pretty confident that you're joking about all this, but I'm bored and I like being right, so it doesn't bother me at all.
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If I'm intelligent enough to do this type of work ahead of time, then it only seems obvious that an advertising agency with the kind of resources needed to create an ad of this quality would be as well.
But, oh well... I guess any unethical action can be justified by simply claiming that you aren't lying if your statement can't necessarily be proven wrong.
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That would be relevant if we were talking about two animation studios. Yes, there is animation in video games, but not every animator works with video games.
Why would an ad agency know about every single small hit in every industry tangentially related to it? Like I said, Katamari Damacy is not a mainstream success and it's not an industry trend. It was a quirky game that got a lot of exposure in the gaming press because it was cute and simple.
I still have no idea why you would expect an ad agency to pay attention to every minor story in the video game press. I understand that's your personal choice, but there is no solid professional reason to do so.
There is almost nothing in the ad that is related to Katamari Damacy. It just happens to build upon the same idea, the snowball thing. It's such a common sense idea. I wouldn't have thought anything of the ad if it hadn't been brought to my attention this way.
Like someone mentioned earlier, the Simpsons did the same thing a few years ago. Are you saying Namco ripped off the Simpsons because that episode is slightly related to Katamari Damacy and a lot of video game designers watch cartooons?
I take it you really have never seen a snowball roll down a hill and get larger. It is a simple concept that anyone can easily understand and it didn't require a video game for conception.
"But, oh well... I guess any unethical action can be justified by simply claiming that you aren't lying if your statement can't necessarily be proven wrong."
Actually, that's the basis for every ethical justice system in the world. If you can't prove something, it isn't true. If you can't be proven guilty, then you're innocent.
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After all, Dawn of the Dead is a mere cult movie, so it should be shrouded in obscurity by at least as much as Katamari Damacy was to this ad agency.
Or how about the Carmageddon series of games released by SCI? Would you buy into any claims that it wasn't somehow inspired by the movie "Death Race 2000"?
Idea snatching of this magnitude is far from uncommon in our world. Especially in the field of entertainment. Taking this ad agency's claims as is, is simply foolish.
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Secondly, and most importantly, Capcom's game has very specific things in common with zombie movies. Like I said, the ad has nothing in common with the game besides the giant snowball. And again, snowballs were not invented by Katamari Damacy or anyone else at Namco.
That McDonald's ad from a few days ago is what you can call idea theft. There are arguments both for and against that theory, but both sides can easily see the videos are related.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/09/mcdonalds-rips-off-gordon-college-mario-show/
That's not the case for Katamari and this ad. A ball rolling down a hill is not the same as an alien rolling a ball to create a star.
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There's no point in arguing over semantics against a borderline sociopath.
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Same thing goes for multimedia: Maybe they watch movies and cartoons, but interactive entertainment never caught their interest. (and anyone, even you, would know the difference between interactive and non-interactive entertainment. Even Thompson would.)
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the ignorance in these comments is hilarious tho. thanks for the entertainent this morning!
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Yes, idea theft happens all the time in advertising and it's entirely legal (whoever said you can't copyright ideas was right), but not owning up to it makes you look stupid. But then again, they're paid a lot of money by their client to come up with original ideas, so if they said "yeah, we got the idea from some video game" the client might not feel too great paying for it. Or paying for other "ideas" in the future.
And yes, they MAY have come up with this all on their own, but I highly doubt it. It may even have been unintentional, but chances are extremely high that someone saw Katamari gameplay at some point and took it from there.
But there really is no way to prove it for either side...
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"There's no point in arguing over semantics against a borderline sociopath."
I guess I'm a sociopath because I like to see facts and proof before I consider something idea theft. I guess a normal person would prefer if people were charged with crimes even if no proof were ever found.
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Despite the insistence of the fanbois, most non-hardcore-gamer folks really DON'T know about Katamari -- and that's not going to change until the industry grows out of its hardcore niche.
--R.J.
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No, no, no. Chances are incredibly small that they've seen any footage of the game. It's possible that some of the dozens of people working on the ad heard of the game, but there's nothing in the ad that can lead you to believe that it was inspired by the game. Only a couple people needed to create the idea and storyboard it and nothing in the ad shows *they* knew of Katamari Damacy.
And even if they had heard of the game, it would have been dumb to reference it. The game is not mainstream. The mainstream audience is the target of this ad. Remember that American Express ad with Pong playing tennis?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMQmzbrteL0
That ad makes sense because *everyone* has heard of Pong. Katamari is not recognizable enough to be the basis of a commercial.
A big difference between Dawn of the Dead inspiring
Dead Rising and this, is that both zombie film and game were targeting the same people. If someone liked Death Race 2000, there's a good chance they'd like Carmagedeon.
That doesn't hold up in this case. This ad is not targeting just those that are into quirky Japanese games.
And again, the snowball effect, which is the only basis for this ad, is independant of Katamari Damacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_effect
Here's it used as a cliche in a cartoon:
http://dailyepisodes.com/index.php?id=8&season=13&series=1
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I never said they were referencing the game. That definitely would be stupid for a mainstream audience. But the effect they went for works for a mainstream audience pretty damn well. I mean, it looks awesome. But that has nothing to do with where they got the inspiration from. The Pong ad is a completely different situation. Instead of taking inspiration from Pong, they just took Pong.
You'll also note that I never said Katamari was mainstream. What I said was that chances were high that SOMEONE saw the gameplay at SOME point and that's where the idea came from. If the game was mainstream almost EVERYONE would have seen the gameplay.
And the statement "there's nothing in the ad that can lead you to believe that it was inspired by the game," is obviously wrong. Just look at the preceding post and the comments following it. There's obviously something there that would lead some of us to think that.
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http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/25/real-life-katamari-in-travelers-insurance-ad/
There are similarities; they both contain a rollig ball of stuff. But there is nothing to show that the add ripped off Katamari Damacy.
Please explain what exactly is ripped off from Katamari Damacy. The ball doesn't start the same way as it does in the game. The setting, which is the biggest reason why people like the game, isn't completely different.
The ball is perpetuated by rolling downhill, which is not the way Katamari has it rolling. The end result of the ball is completely different.
It's a ball of stuff that gets bigger as it goes downhill like every other snowball cliche.
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So while you might think that you guys (animators, etc) are in the same line, they are actually very different industries.
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