Richard Herring speaks out

Richard Herring has told the advertising industry to stop stealing ideas.

He told the Advertising Week Europe conference of industry executives that they should stop exploiting struggling artists by adapting their work to sell products.

And he conceded that he was probably not the ideal person to address the event at Bafta’s HQ in Central London, as he had never appeared in a commercial himself.

He likened doing an advert to selling a kiss-and-tell story to the tabloids, saying: ‘Advertising is like having sex with John Prescott and being paid to tell people about it’.

In an interview following his session, he said he thought he had been the victim of ad industry plagiarism in the past.

‘It’s hard to tell because lots of people have similar ideas,’ he told MediaGuardian. ‘But there’s a few different things down the years when things were slightly appropriated from the stuff I did with Stew [Lee] Also we were so unknown that people could do it without anyone really realising where it was stolen from.

‘I’m more annoyed on behalf of genuine struggling artists who make some viral video and then that gets at taken and changed and then they don’t get paid anything for it.’

Herring also spoke of how he had become a one-man ‘brand’, building up a fan base through podcasts, so creating an audience who would pay to see him live.

But he said: ‘I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t do adverts; I don’t like adverts.

‘I feel, as a comedian, that if you want to say something you should say it. If I’m being paid to say something then people will go ‘Well what do you really believe about anything?”

‘Even though I don’t talk massively about political things, honesty’s such a part of me that if people thought, “He’s being paid to say something he doesn’t think” then [they will also think], “Can we trust the rest of the stuff he says?”

‘So just for me, I don’t think it’s something I’d want to do.

But he conceded there was probably a point where the amount of money being offered was so large that it might prove a moral dilemma, given the good that could be done with the proceeds.

Watch the interview here

Published: 21 Mar 2013