Mormon and Scientologist Ad Campaigns: Who Copied Who?

Posted by TruthIsReason on 1/18/2013 The high-profile Im a Mormon advertising campaign launched in recent years by the LDS Church has marked an abrupt shift in the way that the church markets itself to the public. It has gone from dry, impersonal, infomercial-like TV spots that ask you to call for your free video, Bible, or Book of Mormon to more upbeat, modern videos that simply introduce you to one of its members and end with the words Im a Mormon. Unbeknownst to most, there is a much lower-profile campaign, also launched in recent years, with a similar tagline: I Am a Scientologist. Is this similarity a mere coincidence? Is it the only similarity between the two campaigns? Lets take a look and see

Youve probably spotted a couple more parallels just by looking at the above screenshot snippets from YouTube, but go ahead and watch one or two of the videos from each campaign. You can find them here and here. You can also watch one of the short videos from an entertaining new series called Mormontology, which show a number of striking side-by-side comparisons.

As you watch, youll likely notice the following basic commonalities among most of the ads: They feature an ordinary-looking, clean-cut, middle class person They are entirely narrated by that person, who 1) describes what they do for a living, 2) explains the role their religion has played in their life, and 3) closes with something to the effect of My name is ______. Im a ______. And Im a Mormon/Scientologist. Their titles have practically the same format: The tagline followed by the persons occupation(s). Also, the thumbnail of each video is a photo of the person.

There are probably even more commonalities worth noting that someone more trained in media analysis could identify. I say this because entire presentations were given on the subject by a PhD student at a 2011 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and at a 2012 Sunstone Symposium. If I can get a hold of him, Ill expand this article with his insights. For now, this list is more than sufficient for our purposes. The campaigns also appear to share a common purpose: to dispel persistent negative perceptions and stereotypes regarding the organizations and their members and, in effect, say, See, were just like you! (even though Mormons are supposed to be a peculiar people) in hopes of boosting their public image and furthering their recruitment efforts. To be fair, we should also note the differences between the churches respective ads: The Mormon ads are around three times longer on average The titles of the Scientologist ads include the name of the person featured and the words I Am instead of the contraction Im. Some of these titles replace the words I Am with the word Meet

Again, I might be missing a small item or two, but the point here is that the similarities are undoubtedly much more substantive than the differences. Could it be any coincidence that two similarly marginalized American religious groups suddenly start running nearlyidentical ad campaigns at around the same time? Certainly not! Either these groups hired the same ad agency and that agency was lazy enough and careless enough to lead them both down the same road or there has been some serious idea borrowing going on, to put it gently. As this post from an advertising copywriter on Quora.com explains, they have most definitely not used the same agency, so the question now is Who copied who? To answer that, we need to travel a few years back in time... It has never been any secret that the LDS Church played a pivotal role in getting the infamous Californian Prop 8 passed in 2008, and as a result of that high-profile involvement, its public image was dealt a heavy blow. Determined to repair it, the church hired two big-name advertising agencies the following year. The Im a Mormon campaign was a large part of what resulted and it was launched in 2010. As you can see on this page from Mormon.orgs YouTube channel, on which the videos are sorted with the oldest at the top, their first Im a Mormon ads were posted on October 1, 2010.
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Visiting the analogous page on the Church of Scientologys channel reveals that their first I Am a Scientolgist ads were posted on August 17, 2009, long before the LDS Church had gotten its campaign off the ground. At that time, the Latter-day Saints had either just barely retained their ad agencies or had not even done so yet. Furthermore, some of these videos were titled Meet a Scientologist and, as you can see on the page, the first Meet a Scientologist video ever released was posted clear back on April 3, 2008, several months before Prop 8 had even been voted on. This video had a slightly different structure from the ones that came later, but the idea was the same: feature ordinary folks talking about why they love their religion and finish with them proudly declaring Im a Scientologist. Finally, notice in the Mormontology videos that, in all but one of the comparisons, the Scientologist ad was one to three years older than the corresponding Mormon ad. By the end of September 2009, the church had released 97 of these videos and during the 12 months that followed, they released 20 more. This means that when the very first Im a Mormon video appeared, no fewer than 117 I Am a Scientologist videos were already available. The Mormons are catching up though; as of today, they have posted 165 such videos compared to 203 for the Scientologists (who have only released 3 since Jan 2011). The question we cant help but ask now is who really knew what was going on? Were any of the Mormon churchs top leaders involved in the rip-off or was the knowledge limited to a few higher-ups in the marketing department? Could it have been the fault of a lowly employee or two who found the videos on YouTube and wanted to take credit for the idea? I think that, at the very least, a number of influential people in the department must have known because it doesnt seem plausible that they could have failed to look at the Scientologists latest strategies while searching for ideas. Any organization that has a clue and wants to remain relevant knows that it needs to habitually keep tabs on its competitors to see what is working for them and what isnt. If I were suddenly appointed to lead the LDS Churchs marketing department, the first thing I would do is make sure that we knew what other marginalized minority religious groups like the Church of Scientology were doing to try to bring themselves off of the fringes of society. And I cant believe that Im the only one with enough sense to think of that. If the knowledge was confined, perhaps it has finally spread through the churchs ranks since after steadily releasing several videos per month, none have appeared since October 7. Is the campaign over or just taking a break? Notice that in the first two screen shots at the beginning of this article, the Mormon ad has about 800 times as many views even though the Scientology ad has been around twice as long. My suspicion is that whoever decided to pull the trigger on the copycat project noticed the low view counts and figured that very few people would ever become aware of both campaigns few enough that the risk of public exposure would be outweighed by the benefits of moving forward with the project. Then again, maybe both organizations are simply being inspired by the same higher power a power who is running low on marketing ideas or just has bigger fish to fry. TruthIsReason Please send questions, comments, and corrections to TruthIsReason7@gmail.com
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