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Comment by pathy | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell the agency responsible for the campaign is Mortierbrigade [1]. I haven't been able to confirm it for sure but the original source [2] I found it for seems to be quite knowledge about the Belgian advertising scene.

Adecco's/Mortierbrigade attempts to defend themselves on Facebook have been rather halfhearted so far.[3]

[1]: http://mortierbrigade.com [2]: http://creativecriminals.com/online/adecco-way-to-work/ [3]: https://www.facebook.com/AdeccoWayToWork/posts/5588127241617...

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Halfhearted is a charitable way to put it.

They made it clear that they see nothing wrong with this in principle, they act as if it's all an accidental naming collision, and they start right out of the gate with the old "we're sorry some people are upset" non-apology.

How distinctive is the actual video of the "doppelganger"? I'm genuinely curious, since it's now been taken down.

The name alone could easily have been an accidental collision from a concept developed independently; I'm pretty sure I've searched for available around the world in 80... variants as possible name ideas for a travel site, and I'd never seen Turner's site before (I have read Jules Verne though)

It's a shitty excuse for a nonapology even if it was a genuine accident though.

Considering the actual name of their project is his exact blog URL [1], I can't imagine they looked that hard to see if anyone else had the idea first.

[1] http://aroundtheworldin80jobs.com/

"Around the world in 80 days" is a well-known title, it's not impossible to comes up with using the same title for "job" related topic.

Of course. But you google names you come up with to check if somebody didn't found it earlier. It's hard not to do that.

I saw the video, it was absolutely no accident. They tried to imitate the actual guy.

I don't understand why they think it has to be a "mutually beneficial" solution. That would imply they get benefit out of this too, and they haven't done anything that warrants them getting any kind of benefit out of this blogger's project.

I find nothing capturing about a European hipster running around the world trying out jobs. Especially when I add in the thought that the idea was so clearly jacked from someone else.

Unfortunately thats what a large number of ad agencies spend their time doing. Selling ideas they see online off to brands without contacting or paying the original creator

On the other side of the fence: a lot of the time clients will actually send stuff they've seen online to their ad agencies and ask for it to be 'repurposed'. It happens both ways.

Clients are expected to have no idea what they're doing. That's why they hired the experts, where such behavior is no longer dumb but disgusting.

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