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More stock footage? Samsung joins Dell and Gateway

The two ads above were pointed out way back in July by Engadget. Apparently Dell and Gateway used the same stock footage for their back-to-school campaigns. Same girl, same stupid hat and necklace, same everything.

Well just now I noticed on ESPN.com that Samsung must've been feeling a little left out, so they decided to use the same exact girl/photo in a small Flash ad for digital cameras. That's some nice work by the marketing department.

Do these giant companies not get some sort of assurance when they purhcase stock photography that the same set won't be sold to other companies. At least not to one of your biggest competitors, or at least not for a couple of months. That's pretty ridiculous.

August 2004: She's now not only going back-to-school, but she's going back high on drugs. No wonder she's able to be in so many ads at once, she's powered by Vivarin.

February 2005: Well it's five months later (2/21/2005) and my good friend has popped up once again. Now she's advertising tax services for H&R Block over at Kotaku. Seriously people, that's enough. It's not like it's that great of a photo shoot. Was she the only early twenties white girl photographed in the last year?

April 27, 2005: Reading ESPN the Magazine on the flight home from NYC, and found our friend in an ad for Avia tennis shoes. I bet she got paid like $100 for this photo shoot.

May 1, 2005: Commenter Jeremy points us to BeAnActuary.com. Blonde chick is letting us know that you too can be an actuary, whatever the hell that is.

May 2, 2005 Holy cow I have found the source!! After all these mainstream occurences of this girl I decided to do a Getty Images search for college and girl. Low and behold, she was on page three or four of the results in that damn hat taunting me. The photographer's name is Doug Menuez, so I narrowed the results just to his work and then narrowed further down to college. There's even some photos of her in a different setting and flirting with a guy instead of paying attention in class!

May 27, 2005: The Inquirer has written a story on their mission to find the Everywhere Girl as they call her. They managed to track down the original photographer (thanks to my help!) but unfortunately even he has no idea who the girl is. They do have a couple links to more people tracking her across the web, including a great one with a bunch of stuff I don't have.

The saga continues...

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