Content Stealing, Skincare and the Hive Mind

I am aware that this headline sounds like it's from a science fiction novel, but please stick with me. I have a point to make!

Last week, which feels like a million years ago on the internet, there was a little hubbub over a Super Bowl commercial stealing a concept from a Tiktok creator. The commercial was for Cetaphil and if you didn’t see it, it was about dads finally being able to bond with their daughters over football, thanks to Taylor Swift attending the games to see her boyfriend Travis. The ad featured a white dad with a daughter of color and showed them putting on skincare together, in addition to watching the game. After the commercial aired and got a considerable amount of positive attention, a creator named Sharon Mbabazi accused the brand of stealing her content, or at the very least, using her content as direct inspiration without credit. When she put some of the visuals side by side, they did seem remarkably similar. But was it stealing?

Cetaphil’s first response was to make a statement that they loved the creator’s content but also implied that they saw it only after their commercial had already been made. They also implied that the similarity was the reason for the commercial’s positive reception— it hit upon a truth that was happening in so many different households across the country, as successful ads always do. But Mbabazi and a lot of the comments on her account, as well as videos I saw from other creators discussing the controversy, seemed to think that Cetaphil’s response was bullshit. People also made the point that the brand might not have known, but the agency who came up with the concept could have used Mbabazi’s tiktoks for inspiration without telling Cetaphil. Or one junior person on the creative team could have seen the tiktok and presented their concept to the agency side without their bosses knowing the inspiration. And I’ll tell you, as someone who used to work as a creative in advertising, I’m not sure whether this constitutes stealing either. Agency creatives pull from pop culture all the time. It’s not just standard practice, it’s considered part of the job. The only difference is that when I was doing it 15 years ago, I was most likely pulling from TV and movies that were already capitalizing on their ideas. Now, ad agencies are potentially pulling from small creators who aren’t necessarily making anything off their content.

Personally, I don’t think it’s as simple as whether or not the brand or agency stole one creator’s content or if they should have credited them, because that doesn’t take into account perhaps the most influential part of this scenario— the algorithm. I think we’ve all experienced thinking about something and then watching it pop up on our FYP or discovery page. As someone who is chronically online, this happens to me almost daily. Sometimes it will be a product, sometimes it will be a topic and lots of times it will be a concept that I was planning on shooting or writing about. So then I have to think, should I not write about it because it’s already been written? Do I need to include this person now, if I decide to do my own take? What is the difference between jumping on a trending topic and stealing someone’s idea?

What about the possibility that someone on the agency side came up with the Super Bowl concept on their own and then was fed Mbabazi’s content while they were in the process of creating the ad? Or, what if they pulled from a ton of similar videos including Mbabazi, because it was all over their FYP in different forms, and it just so happened that one creator called them out? What is stealing when, thanks to algorithm, so many of us are thinking and doing the same things?

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the NYTimes kept writing articles about things I was mentioning on my Instagram story. My first thought was that someone from the NYT must be following me and getting ideas, but then I realized it was probably the reverse. Instagram was serving me up the posts from the NYT that they knew I would be interested in, because that’s what I was writing about on my story. But also, and this is the creepier part of the equation, I think I probably operate in similar parts of the internet as some of the writers from the NYT (Manhattan, liberal, chronically online, etc.) putting a lot of us on the same social media algorithms, so we all start to have similar trains of thought bringing us to similar ideas for content. As much as I want to think that our thoughts are unique and that there are intelligent adults helping me decide what to care about and pay attention to, we are all being manipulated by the same data points.

You know when you have a conversation with a friend over dinner and then you go home, open up social media and see an article about that exact topic? Our first thought is that our phones are listening to us. But I actually think it goes much deeper than that and started way before we had that conversation at dinner. I think the reason we had that conversation and the reason the author wrote that article and the reason it got served up to you at that exact moment is because the algorithms have been following our every move online for over 10 years now. They don’t just know what we are thinking about, they know the path that got us there, how long that path takes, and who is on that same path with us. People talk about the “wellness to Qanon pipeline” and I think we all understand what that means, but think we are unaffected. But there are millions of different pipelines, which might be much more benign, but still influence our thoughts, actions and purchases. Like the “looking up a European ski vacation to buying a Moncler jacket pipeline” or the “watching too many tiktoks to self-diagnosing with ADHD to looking into medication pipeline” or the “Swiftie to Chiefs fan to doing skincare with your football loving dad pipeline.”

The algorithm also knows that if you liked an ad made by Cetaphil, or you are part of the brand team who created the ad for Cetaphil, or you created content that is similar to Cetaphil’s ad, you would probably like to see other Cetaphil related content, so when people like Mbabazi accuse Cetaphil of stealing, there is a very high likelihood that Cetaphil will see it, along with a large amount of people who are already engaging with the ad online. The same way that a guy who starred in Glee commented on a Tiktok where Harlow was wearing a Glee sweatshirt. This wasn’t the case a few years ago, when content had a much harder time finding its intended audience.

After a bit of backlash, Cetaphil ended up settling with the creator pretty swiftly. The details of the settlement were not revealed but Mbabazi posted that Cetaphil made it right by her and she was satisfied. I think that was the right move for the brand. In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether they were in the right or not; public perception is everything and the settlement was well received. But it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people realize the power of the algorithms and use them to their advantage. If a person’s story is compelling, the size of their following doesn’t matter (Mbabazi’s account at the onset of this controversy was relatively small), they can still get their story heard. And as it gets harder to tell where our ideas originated, I believe there will be in an uptick in accusations of stealing.

Case in point, I just took a break from writing this post and opened tiktok. One of the first tiktoks to pop up was from a creator named Elliot Duprey, who accused Vogue of plagiarizing a video he made about “eclectic grandpa style.” Now that might sound ridiculous, but he presented his case with screenshots of various copied excerpts and it’s pretty compelling. Plus, Duprey’s video has over 100K views and over 3000 comments, and I would bet that’s considerably more eyeballs and engagement than the Vogue article. Now, did tiktok serve that video up because they somehow knew what I’ve been writing for the last few hours? Or did it serve it up because I've been paying attention to the Cetaphil controversy for the last week? Or maybe it served it up because of my comment about the NYT copying me a few weeks ago? Or perhaps I have been on this same path alongside Mbabazi, the ad creative that came up with the Super Bowl ad, the fashion creator that came up with eclectic grandpa style, the Vogue plagiarizer, and the entire New York Times news room for far longer than any of us realize.

We have seen how the siloed nature of the internet has divided us. Now maybe we will see how the hive mind aspect of the internet affects our thoughts and creativity. And in a world where tiktoks have the potential to get way more views than mainstream media outlets, I think journalists, advertisers, TV show runners, etc. will have to start crediting creators for their ideas, whether they think they deserve it or not.