Tag: pirate square

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.

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.