McCABE: CANADIAN NOKIA 'BACKGROUNDS' AD A SCAM

A note from Steve McCabe, CD of Y&R, Auckland, regarding their AXIS winning Nokia 'Backgrounds' campaign, that hopefully clears the agency of plagiarism:

I trust you’re very familiar with our Nokia Video video calling campaign and the fact that the idea was supposedly done in Toronto a few years back. Well, Tony and I have been very suspicious of that work since it was first posted on the NZ and CB blogs. So, we’ve been trying to find out the truth behind it.
Looking at the layout of the ad (pictured), it is not done to Nokia guidelines. They have omitted the handset number (like 6680) which every Nokia ad worldwide has.
A few international juries have awarded our campaign. The North American One Show (merit), Cannes (silver) with a North American on the jury. They certainly would not have, if they’d seen the idea before.
A closer look at the PDF suggests it was only a rough mock up and not real (look at the attachment and the low res pack shot).
Finally I managed to get hold of Joe Amaral, CD of TBWA Toronto. He wasn’t at the agency when they had Nokia as a client, but was very helpful in trying to find out the truth behind the ad.
After a bit of asking around, he eventually came back with this official line “the ads never ran in paid conventional media”.
It seems clear that the TBWA Toronto campaign never ran. Which surely makes accusations of plagiarism redundant. We’d be grateful if you could clear our names, especially with AWARD judging coming up.
If someone has decided to try and hijack a campaign knowing full well it could not be a copy and is not a copy, it is very depressing indeed. I have heard rumours about who did it on this occasion and that they are angry because some of their work was kicked out of Axis (Because the idea had been done before.) Our Nokia video call backgrounds first ran back in October and have had much publicity since then. Interesting how it took until after the Axis judging for the Canadian work to come to the fore.
We all strive to be original, different and to do the best work we can. But there’s always a good chance that someone, somewhere in the world had the same idea as you. And if the work has been in awards annuals, maybe we should be aware of the idea. Surely we should save allegations of copying ideas for ads that have actually been produced. We can’t be expected to have seen every Canadian’s book of ads that never ran.