On Motivations, TBWAChiat/Day, and “Pirate Square”

There’s been a lot of speculation, including by me, on the question as to why TBWAChait/Day is the agency behind what is being called “Pirate Square” by folks in the artists’ rights community.  And I feel foolish for overlooking the most obvious explanation, which is selling the agency itself.  Ad agencies spend a significant amount of money and internal resources promoting themselves, and in fact the icon of the pirate is  central to the Chiat/Day brand.  On the TBWAChiat/Day website, you will find a button that says “Pirate Culture,” which pops up a screen that features a quote by co-founder Jay Chiat that reads, “It’s better to be the pirate than the Navy.”  This is followed by a bit of cultural identity language stating, Pirates don’t live by rules and conventions, they break them. They seize upon every opportunity, creating their own when none can be found.  That’s why we proudly fly the pirate flag.  Always have.  Always will.

Apropos of what I said in my previous post about the new generation of creative advertisers taking over a stodgy, homogenous industry in the late 60s and early 70s, this common romanticism of the pirate as dashing rebel fits the spirit of those times.  Of course the legacy of that revolution is that, today, every ad agency wants to promote itself as the edgiest, most forward-thinking, rule-breaking, unconventional, and most creative choice in the market. But when everybody’s a rebel, nobody is, and the competition to out-cool the other guy occasionally strains sound, strategic marketing principles.  We see this when, from time to time, award-winning ads do nothing for the brands they’re meant to promote.

So, it’s possible that the scuttlebutt about TBWAChiat/Day doing its part in this campaign pro bono is true, and perhaps the reason is that the pirate itself is such a big part of the agency’s brand.  In fact, the design and color palette of the outdoor and companion website for this campaign is consistent with that of Chiat/Day’s own look — solid blocks of color, a lot of black and white, the same or similar sans serif font.  So, no matter who footed the bill for the space itself, it is not unreasonable to assume that TBWAChiat/Day’s leadership saw this as a perfect opportunity to promote its own brand on Times Square and in a way that would generate tons of free publicity (including from bloggers like me) because they knew full well that they were poking a stick at a bee’s nest.

The pirate as romantic rebel endures despite the fact we know that actual pirates were nothing like their storybook versions; and there is no reason why myth and truth should not coexist.  Jay Chiat was right*, of course, that if you want to say you’re more creative than the other guy, it’s “better to be the pirate than the Navy,” especially in 1968 when the military was involved in one of the most unpopular conflicts in American history.  In 2013, though, the piracy this campaign celebrates could not be less rebellious, edgy, or adventurous.  Anyone who thinks downloading a bunch of Adele tunes for free is a form of social protest or cutting-edge thinking is sorely in need of a real cause.

I may be wrong in this analysis; these things come about in so many different ways; but the coincident link between TWBAChiat/Day’s brand and this campaign is too obvious to ignore. If I’m right, of course, it’s a bit of a calculated risk for the agency.  Pro piracy messages may be popular among consumers between the ages of 12 and 35, but these   views are not necessarily consistent with those of decision-makers at the major brands who hire ad agencies. For instance, I’m pretty sure Chiat/Day’s clients The Grammys or GlaxoSmithKline might have something to say on the subjects of intellectual property and enterprise-scale piracy.

Were I to meet Jay Chiat today, I’d have to “push back,” as the account execs like to say, and suggest that when it comes to creative thinking, it is indeed better to mirror the cunning of the mythological pirate; but when it comes to making ethical or pragmatic choices in the real world, it’s sometimes okay to be the Navy.

*See follow-up article regarding the origin of this quote.

Times are a changin’ – but in what direction?

I am a son of the advertising business.  The year I was born, my father was a senior writer  working for Guy Day in Los Angeles prior to the 1968 merger with Jay Chiat that would produce the industry powerhouse known as Chiat/Day and is now known as TBWAChiat/Day. In the late 1960s, my father’s contemporaries in general, and Chiat/Day in particular, represented a revolutionary generation of advertising professionals who changed the game demonstrably from the world we see fictionalized in the hit show Mad Men. Up to about the mid-1960s, a job in the ad business was often a favor granted to young, white, protestant men by old, white, protestant men, who generally had few talents beyond the art of the three-martini lunch. By the 1970s, the ad business had diversified culturally and geographically beyond the aeries and saloons of New York and Chicago, and with this came a renaissance in which writers, art directors, and filmmakers all took creative risks that were unthinkable just a decade before.

d046472bf2477f706780aaa1a5d8246bSo, what are we to make of this campaign?  Does it represent the visionary legacy of the agency just keeping in step with our digital times? Or is it a reversion to the days of old-boy networks selling Lucky Strikes in the schoolyard? One thing it is not — is  terribly creative.

For the next couple of weeks, Times Square will include among its multi-million-dollar outdoor placements, a stark display headlined by the declaration Piracy is Progress.  This provocative lead is justified by the pretense that it is merely a benign attention-getter inviting “artists” to a website where they can vote Yay or Nay on the question of whether piracy as a good or bad thing.  The campaign itself is claimed to be the concept of the band Ghost Beach as a means to “stimulate discussion” on the issue, and the agency of record is TBWA Chiat/Day. But let’s guess that there’s no way Ghost Beach is paying for the campaign alone, if at all, especially the quarter ton of raw bullion it costs to buy space in Times Square.  So, who is paying for the campaign to declare that piracy is progress on the world’s largest ad stage? Chris Castle is dead right to call the headline Orwellian, and I have to say that the brain warp induced by an encounter with this particular sampling of Newspeak jostles a not-too-distant memory of an award-winning TV commercial for Apple Computer based on 1984 and produced by…guess which agency? Well, one must roll with the times, I suppose, and maybe Big Brother is cool now.

The fraud in this campaign barely warrants discussion, as I think it would be obvious that the online poll question about piracy is exclusively a diversion being used to sell one particular answer (and maybe a few Ghost Beach albums). I’ll give the guys at TWBAChiat/Day this much:  it is the quintessential ad for our times — creatively facile, a careless abuse of a complex issue, and shrouded in the guise of phony populism. It is exemplary of the worst in communications in the digital age in that it pretends to invite participation, pretends to ask what you think while telling you exactly what you should think. And let’s not spend too much time considering how absurd it is to claim that an online poll can invite one particular group to participate and then state with any accuracy that these are the people responding.  Here’s a random Tweet from one “artistforpiracy”:  Any artist that disagrees I would love to hear why you prefer record labels ruining your music instead.  In other words, more of the same hackneyed presumptions from people who don’t make art for a living and have no idea what they’re talking about.

When I was in my early teens, I remember asking my father if there were any clients he wouldn’t pursue — by this time he was running his own L.A. agency with an art-director partner he met at Chiat/Day — and his one-word answer was, “Cigarettes.”  Interestingly enough, in a 2004 Adweek Interview with TBWAChiat/Day’s current Chief Creative Officer, Mark Figliulo, was asked the same question, to which he replied, “The George W. Bush campaign.”  Fair enough, and I guess I can count Mr. Figliulo as a fellow progressive; but then I’m confused by the failure of social responsibility here. After all, Mark Figliulo has done a lot of really solid, creative work in his career, even directing some of his own TV spots or working with talents like Spike Jonze on commercials for Miller Lite.  It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to think that professionals like Figliulo and his creative team fail to consider the intricate relationship between their own careers and those of artists and rights holders, who might choose not to be exploited.  Just as one obvious example, Miller Lite has a pretty strong brand association with the NFL, and last I checked, those guys are rather serious about protecting their broadcasting rights from piracy.

Whoever paid for this campaign is probably a very attractive client, and maybe the short money says screw the artists. On the other hand, maybe the creative team at TBWAChiat/Day really do believe they’re on the leading edge of the next renaissance.  I don’t presume to know their minds, but I do have to say this campaign has all the integrity and cleverness of “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.”

See follow-up article here.

Copyright, copyright everywhere…

There is certainly no shortage of copyright in the news these days, and readers of this blog might wonder about my silence on subjects like the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kirtsaeng or the testimony before Congress by Register of Copyright Maria Pallante calling for the next great overhaul of the law. For starters, when I began writing IOM, I never intended for it to overemphasize copyright as a topic; and I have stated repeatedly in posts and comments that there are plenty of sites (see blogroll) hosted by legal experts in Intellectual Property, which I do not presume to be. In fact, one of my ongoing criticisms of the Web is that its mechanisms tend to bring out the armchair expert on all subjects, regardless of their complexity, which invariably reduces even the most intricate matters to popular sentiment based on prejudices already held before discussion began.  An illusion of discourse heading in no particular direction.

I write this blog from two main perspectives — as an artist working to navigate a changing career in the middle of tremendous upheaval and churn; and as a citizen with a measure of socratic humility, admitting that my observations are limited and that there are always experts who know more than I about many things. I bet if I walked into my local diner and talked to the 50+ crowd, I could gather a smattering of opinions on say North Korea but probably receive blank stares on copyright.  If I did the same thing with a bunch of local sixteen year-olds, I might get blank stares on North Korea and an earful on the evils of copyright.  Odds are, of course, few of these opinions will be grounded in quality journalism, let alone first-source expertise.  Yes, the Internet makes it possible to cut through bumper-sticker politics and acquire expert information, but it’s also a great tool for repeating the bumper stickers, which is why amateurs can make a whole career out of repeating what people want to hear, regardless of substance. So it is with copyright.

If uninformed, declaratives about copyright are the froth in your latte, then TechDirt is the site for you. I read Mike Masnick’s post, for instance, concerning Pallante’s testimony, and the typical blogger thing to do would be for someone like me to critique that post fallacy by fallacy; but the prospect of doing so is almost as tedious as it is futile.  After all, both Masnick and I are about as expert on copyright law as we probably are on plumbing.  Those opposed to strong copyright protections already agree with his post, and those in favor will agree with mine. Meanwhile, I’m betting a large segment of the American population neither knows nor cares to know about the inner workings of these laws; so I often find myself wondering about the value of us amateurs arguing via blog over some of the more fleeting and granular aspects of a legal system that will likely take several years to evolve into its next incarnation.

So, for anyone who reads this blog and is not knee-deep in the gore of the copyright battle, the big picture as I see it this:  I believe the copyright system will change over the next decade or so, but if that change is predicated too much on the self-serving premises of its tech-industry antagonists, the results for artists in particular, and for society in general, will be regressive rather than progressive. It would be like allowing the oil industry to overly influence emissions policy.  Copyright stifles innovation is a popular meme and a cornerstone premise of the entire cabal aligned against the system, but this assertion is never supported by solid examples or data, which leads one to conclude that innovation describes what is contemporary and popular, regardless of whether or not it is economically progressive or, dare I say, fair.  We generalists could boil down the details to  a few fundamental questions when considering the future of copyright:  Is enterprise-scale piracy innovation or exploitation? Is the right of the author a civil right or a government handout?  Is copyright relevant for the individual or just a tool for big corporations?

These may be questions my kids’ generation will have to answer, but in order to do so honestly, they will need to come to terms with certain practical realities that don’t require legal scholarship.  First, they’ll need to recognize that the Internet is not an extension of themselves, but a technological piece of infrastructure over which just a few corporations wield unprecedented power.  Next, they’ll need to see past the selfish habit of acquiring media for free and accept that there is no such thing as an economy based on free stuff, that someone always pays and who pays makes a difference.  They’ll need to recognize that no matter what they believe about big media companies and lobbyists, flesh-and-blood, independent artists and small creative businesses are experiencing tangible and measurable harm. In fact, as I write this, musician and activist David Lowery, speaking at the Canadian Music Week’s Global Forum, just said the following: “The first week our new Camper Van Beethoven album came out, I watched one seed on BitTorrent distribute more copies than we sold.” I think you have to be both daft and depraved to describe this as innovation, and this kind of spin has no business informing the future of copyright.

I was asked the other day by a gadfly baiting me on Twitter if a “win” for me would be the triumph of the RIAA and the MPAA. I don’t know what that means, and neither does the gadfly; but these implicit accusations are typical of the associative politics to which neither conservatives nor progressives are immune.  Such interactions are circular, boring, and meaningless. And the hypocrisy is off the charts. I won’t pretend I’m a legal scholar, but the number of tech utopians who presume to lecture the creative community about how to make albums, motion pictures, and other works is truly staggering.

As I say, this blog was never intended to be all about copyright, and it occurs to me that part of its intent was to share observations from the perspective of developing new film projects in the current landscape. I admit that I am too easily attracted to the broad discussion, and I shall make an effort to steer this blog to be a little more film project focused, if for no other reason than film is next and may be more vulnerable than music.  It’s been a long time since Lars Ulrich was pilloried on the steps of Napster, and today we see musicians, from fairly obscure to the biggest names, coming forward to talk about artists’ rights in the digital age, and not without reason.  The truth is I don’t care if I or one of my colleagues develops a new film as a self-produced project, a deal with a Netflix, a traditional studio, or an established indie production company — whatever best serves the work.  But there is not one of these paths that is not founded on the right of the author to retain first choice in the process by establishing a precedent of ownership in the work.  Beyond that fundamental reality are many intricate details for professionals to work out and a whole lot of amateur-hour bullshit that deserves once and for all to be moved to the fringes of the debate.