Lucky Minnesota and the Collective Unconscious

To promote the Minnesota State lottery, Colle+McVoy created a town called Lucky, MN. Not a bad idea, but quite a familiar one. Barkley, Evergreen & Partners of Kansas City, Missouri promoted the Missouri Lottery with a very similar fictional city named, "Luckytown."

The boys over at American Copywriter like to talk about the "collective unconscious," although they put it in the context of advertising rather than Carl Jung's original psychological context. In advertising, this theory is the notion that two people working completely independently of each other can come up with the same idea.

New ad campaigns will always resemble their predecessors, lending credibility to the old adage, there are no new ideas in advertising. But what about the exact same idea with a different execution in a different state only a few years later? I think I know what Barkley Evergreen would say.