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On May 1, 2022, Grand Frais, a French fresh food retail specialist, and its advertising agency Rosa Paris released their first film campaign. A film that, evidently, was a huge success, so much so that it went global!
But obviously they weren't the only ones. A little less than two months after Grand Frais's launch, on June 20, 2022, Monoprix in Qatar ran a strikingly similar campaign (same story, same framing, same acting, same directing; "even the pineapple!"... A campaign that was immediately busted by the renowned copycat hunter, Joe La Pompe.
Rather than seeing this as a problem, The French grocery store chain saw it as a tribute: if this foreign chain recreated the film so meticulously, it’s because they really liked it and that they saw that it was particularly successful.
So instead of taking legal measures and doing a big fuss about it, they came up with such an unexpected idea, as the ad says "the craziest copycat ever needed the craziest answer ever."
So to avoid other retailers spending time and money reproducing the film, Grand Frais and its agency decided to release a "white label" version to give them a leg up.
"Swing the Copycat" puts the two campaigns side by side and shows the agency's response in a light-toned humorous fashion. One by one, the Grand Frais logo was removed from all the film's shots so, now, all competitors--agencies and brands-- can easily insert their own logo and create their own version using a generic version of the film, free of charge.
If this is not clever way of making buzz and "swing the copycat", so what is?
