Tag: times square

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.