Plagiarism in Advertising: Cases and Consequences

What Is Plagiarism in Advertising?

Plagiarism in advertising is a common phenomenon where various advertising agencies adopt other’s works and imitate their style. The act of plagiarism is unethical, immoral, and illegal. The person or organizations from where the works are stolen can claim copyright infringement.

Recently, a Malaysian advertising agency was found guilty of copying the expertise of a British designer. The original one got published before the plagiarised version. There was a remarkable similarity in both artworks.

However, the previous has tried to add an impression of dissimilarity to the latter’s work. The Malaysian agency has also claimed their work as original, and any similarity is entirely coincidental.

A recent case of plagiarism has occurred when a CNBC reporter has found a similarity of an entire article along with the story headline with the New York Times post. Advertising agencies can use copyright protection to safeguard their works.

What Are the Instances of Plagiarism in Advertising?

There are incidents of people ripping off others’ marketing slogans and pitching to potential clients. Plagiarism checking is essential for borrowing ideas that ruin the reputation of individuals, organizations, businesses, or institutions.

However, there has been some improvement since the 1960s, and online advertising and distribution venues are growing. Modern-day advertising is susceptible to plagiarism. Following are some of the segments of advertising that are prone to plagiarism.

• Plagiarism in a Press Release

A press release is a good platform that provides opportunities to the companies to launch a new product and increase visibility in the competitive sector. With the help of press release services, organizations can distribute a release to online publishers.

A press release is inexpensive, and it improves a business’s online presence. Often, press releases are vulnerable to plagiarism. They tend to copy ideas of high content value and omit the company’s name.

• SEO Plagiarism

Search Engine Organizations are responsible for optimizing a company’s web presence. SEO work is an essential part of ad agencies to bolster the clients’ web presence. Ad agencies can follow several methods to achieve optimization.

The most favored amongst them is encouraging original works. Often, the external distribution venues and the companies’ websites are full of keyword-specific content. Duplicate content can be responsible for losing the company’s value on search engines. Thus, damaging the reputation.

• Plagiarism in Social Media

Plagiarism has become so familiar with the advent of social media and other online distribution venues in advertising. The accusation of plagiarism hurts an advertising agency.

Nowadays, social media is a valuable medium for any reputable ad agency. Individuals, brands, and companies can interact with their fans through social media networks like Twitter and Facebook. They can also use these platforms to raise awareness for a service or product.

However, plagiarism is widespread here too. Often, Twitter users re-tweet a post, but this practice provides attribution and acknowledges the original creator. There are debates on the tweets not having the token ‘RT.’

Ad agencies must focus on creating and publishing unique content with innovative messages for the consumers. Duplicate contents have diminished value.

Reasons and Repercussions of Publishing Plagiarized Advertisements

Often some websites display ads with plagiarized content from legitimate companies. Reputable SEO like Google rejects the scraped contents, but the services partnered with Google may accept them. There are other legitimate companies too that advertise on the openly plagiarized website. In a nutshell, the entire online ad industry is standing on the system.

Though few in numbers, bad actors can infect the entire process and lower the standard. These harmful actors get help from the middlemen, and so it is not easy to catch them.

How Are The Middlemen Responsible?

The layers upon layers of intermediaries have made the ad agencies too obtuse and opaque to be rectified. The technology companies, demand, and supply chains are full of middlemen who drive colossal money. Ultimately, publishers receive a percentage of cash relatively lower than they deserve.

Often, the advertisers are clueless about how an ad can go wide upon a plagiarized site. These layers work for streamlining and automating internet advertising. Besides helping advertisers and publishers widen the audience base and maximize profit, they help bad actors easily slip into the system.

Solutions of Plagiarism in Advertising Companies

Ad agencies desire to catch hold and eliminate these bad actors. Nevertheless, still, there is no long-term repercussion for them to suffer. Laws for intellectual property are not stringent enough to punish plagiarists. Companies are there that allow partnership and maintain a connection with these website makers.

To check plagiarism in the advertising industry, advertisers must buy concepts directly from publishers. This practice might be a little expensive, but it ensures the authenticity of their purchasing. Publishers must support legitimate content creation to retain the value.

More so, the implementation of broader consolidation and policing the current structure is necessary to check plagiarism. Industry regulation could be of help with accountability and transparency. However, the system is complex and layered enough to block the activities of bad actors.

Fake news sites are burgeoning and harming the industry rapaciously. There is the absence of solid motivation to fix the issue of plagiarism. Solutions are there but act in vain. The resolutions are worse than the issues.

How Come Copyleaks Solves Plagiarism Issues of Ad Agencies?

The problem of plagiarism is not touched, no matter the intensity of the issue. Ad agencies continue to scrape articles and news stories as there is no harsh impunity to rectify this behavior. More so, the system is ready to reward them.

Content creators can use online plagiarism checkers and run their content before submission and publication to ensure authenticity. Copyleaks is a comprehensive plagiarism scanner that performs extensive searches across databases and the internet to compare texts online. 

Final Takeaways

Although ad agencies have earned a bad name for plagiarism, they can change if motivated correctly. The changes, if incorporated, may impact all, including the innocent. But, with strong determination, the industry can solve this issue by taking suitable measures.