STA Borrows Globe Idea, We Shake Heads in Righteous Disgust

No idea's original, but in any field the taboo is the same: if even a successful idea can be traced back to somebody else's sleeper hit, fingers get pointed. For a shining example, just look at Suzuki's attempts to be BMW.

A source tells us elements of the STA World Traveler Contest are suspiciously similar to an existing campaign that's lesser-known but more complete in scope. St. Georges School in the Grenada West Indies used the same pinpricked-globe format to highlight, not starry-eyed co-eds, but far-flung alumni they've accumulated over 30 years. Visit the St. Georges website and click on the 30 year anniversary logo at bottom left to catch the similarities.

If you don't feel like clicking back and forth, that's okay; we'll show you.

We'd hate to stigmatize STA for such an embarrassing faux-pas, so we'll go ahead and tsk-tsk the agency. Come on, guys. While we can't expect you to have visited every website in the world before coming up with your globe idea, with STA's sizable built-in audience of drooly middle-class wanderlusters, you could have presented this contest any way you wanted - with a Maypole, dancing tiki gods, Tahitian dancers and bagpipe-players, even - and still hit home. Instead we feel betrayed and mildly violated. And that's an icky feeling. Just ask Dakota Fanning.