Tag: Chiat/Day

Playing Pirate with Chiat/Day

In my follow-up about Chiat/Day and the “Pirate Square” campaign, I suggested that the agency’s decision to produce the work was motivated by an opportunity to promote the Chiat/Day brand itself in a big way and for free.  And the more I look at the whole business, the more I’m convinced this is what happened.  According to this article in Billboard, John Ocean and Eric Mendelsohn of Ghost Beach were offered the valuable Times Square space by landlord American Eagle Outfitters as at least partial payment for use of one of the band’s songs in an AEO commercial.  The duo states that addressing piracy was their idea and that they took the whole thing to TBWAChiat/Day, who developed the campaign for free.  I think the tactical decision was that the agency would naturally do the work pro bono because no matter what happens for Ghost Beach or American Eagle Outfitters, the entire campaign promotes Chiat/Day, including any negative press, because “pirate culture” is at the core of the agency’s brand.  The source of this cultural identity is attributed to an aphorism by Jay Chiat, supposedly said shortly after the 1968 founding that, “Its better to be the pirate than the Navy.”  It occurred to me, though, that the contemporary agency’s claim that the proverbial pirate flag has been flying ever since Chiat uttered these words in the late ‘60s might be what we call truth in advertising.

Neither my own father nor his colleagues, who were with either Chiat or Day before the merger, has any recollection of a pirate motif; and there is no mention of the theme in the book Chiat/Day: The First 20 Years.  Stevan Alburty, who began working at the agency in 1977 and worked in the New York office until 1994, says he believes the pirate branding came about sometime in the 1990s after he left, which seems about right with regard to pop culture and the dawn of the digital age.  Alburty also hosts a blog called Jay/Day, which is frequented by former employees of the agency, so you’d think someone might remember what the agency calls its mantra, if it were indeed a mantra dating back to the early days of the business.  And here’s the kicker:  an anonymous but reliable source traceable through my personal, family connections to this particular agency says that the quote about being the pirate comes from Steve Jobs and that the entire pirate ethos, including the flag, originates from within the C/D creative team that worked on the Apple account. In fact, a quick search for quotes does attribute to Steve Jobs the words “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.” And I think we all know what Jobs meant when we look at Apple design relative to the rest of the computer industry.

So, why bring this up at all?  Why out Chiat/Day on this relatively harmless bit of revisionist history?  I’m not interested in petty gotchas, and as I said in the previous post, the pirate theme is a perfectly good choice for branding a long tradition of pushing creative boundaries and producing some brilliant work.  So what if the story takes a little license with the truth?  And what has it got to do with Times Square and the flap over the ArtistsvsArtists campaign?

Just this:

It’s okay to want to do what all the cool kids are doing, and Chiat/Day has plenty of street cred when it comes to advertising cool; but it can be a dangerous business when the cool kid starts to believe his own bullshit and takes his act too seriously.  As attractive as this opportunity must have been, its execution implies that the leadership at TBWAChiat/Day New York either don’t get that piracy of creative works is a serious and complex business, or they don’t care.  It makes me think of a story in which a guy dressed as a raffish pirate for a costume party gets knocked on the head and wakes up at the right hand of Edward Teach (Blackbeard) on the day the real-life pirate is threatening to hang men, women, and children unless their native township paid a ransom for their lives. Yeah, it’s a very Brady plot, but you get the idea about the contrast between myth and history, right? It’s okay to play pirate as long as you remember what is and is not a game.

Treating online piracy as a progressive business model emphasizes unfounded, techno-utipian ideas over the hard-won history of individual, creative achievement.  I and others believe the endgame can be a lasting, damaging effect on a system that has given creative people autonomous power to author great works, including the ground-breaking advertising of Chiat/Day, who is a beneficiary of this system in so many ways.  This whole  “Pirate Square” story is rife with irony, including the quote boosted from Jobs and attributed to Chiat that seeds a brand message, which leads to this Orwellian campaign brought to you by the same agency that once produced the award-winning TV spot for Apple in 1984 based on 1984.  But I think the real irony is this:  by choosing to play pirate with live ammo on the high-tech seas, the frigate Chiat/Day enabled this humble sailor to come broadside to its entire brand identity and blow a pretty big hole through its hull.

ADDENDUM:  With regard to motives and understanding who benefits, it’s worth noting that according to data published on The Trichordist, the band Ghost Beach did not appear to get much out of this deal.  This is consistent with what many of us see as the difference between vague promises of the digital age and tangible results that put food on the table.

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.