144: RIP Jim Riswold
A reflection on a creative person I deeply admire
In a few hours I’m dropping my oldest off at the airport as he makes his way to Loyola University in New Orleans to begin studying music business. My brain is filled with the cognitive dissonance of 18 years flying by. And they tell you it will fly by and you don’t believe them, until it does, and you do.
Good luck, Maks!
“It was wrong to…”
What is a Copywriter put on this earth to accomplish?
I think the great ones notice, embrace, and amplify tension.
In the case of Jim Riswold, the first Copywriter hired at Wieden+Kennedy, his mountain top was to change culture. And he did it. Several times. Mostly by suggesting an approach—leveraging a tension—which the status quo would deem wrong. “I worship wrong,” Riswold added [in his 2006 op-ed]. Riswold advanced the concept of, “advertising that dares to be more than not wrong.”
In 1992 there was a distinct animosity towards advertising borrowing from pop culture, especially music. It was called “selling out.” Riswold (and a young director named David Fincher) pushed that tension.
Jim got a letter.
“I came back to New York and turned on the TV; this time it was the Wimbledon tennis match between Agassi and Ivanisevic. Again, at the most exciting moment, ‘Instant Karma’ jumped out from the screen. What an incredible up-note; a strong, energetic message artistically delivered at the most powerful moment!
With Love,
Yoko Ono”
In 1993, Nike was a fast-rising cultural juggernaut, heavily influencing kids, parents, schools. In that context, it was easy for the status quo to demand a type of behavior from Nike’s star athletes—to put them on a ridiculous pedestal. Riswold noticed that tension, and wrote the following for Charles Barkley.
“Just because I dunk a basketball, doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
As Barkley noted in this interview 26 years later, more than 90% of the feedback Nike received was positive. And the tension continues to resonate.
“Don’t settle for walking.”
Almost a decade before Riswold collaborated with Barkley or Lennon, he created a tension using just four words. And Lou Reed. This is the story of Copywriting restraint and creative collaboration. The idea—film Lou Reed saying just four words at the end of a mood piece set in the Lower East Side of NYC—owes almost everything to the work of director Steve Horn and especially editor Lawrence Bridges. (Great backstory here via Open Culture.) While the campaign from agency Dailey & Associates might not have sold many scooters (I was the target audience in 1984—scooters, even those promoted by Miles Davis, Devo, and Grace Jones—were not appealing), it did impact Honda. According to editor Bridges, “when the commercial was finished playing the man from Honda broke the tension by saying, ‘We need to be THAT scooter company.’” Advertising should strive for nothing less.
Then sometimes tension shows up when you’d rather it didn’t.
Imagine you’re the world’s second most famous shoe company and you’ve got a multi-year contract with an athlete who plays both baseball and football professionally, a feat never achieved before or since. In 1991 Bo Jackson was quite possibly the most versatile athlete ever. Here’s a Riswold-led effort playing on the absurd tension surrounding Jackson’s all-around talent.
And then Jackson gets injured.
How do you sell shoes now?
According to Riswold, you lean into the tension. You lean into it hard.
“So Bo’s got a bum hip. So what? Look what he’s doing with that hip.”
Riswold understood and evangelized at least two things:
Where there’s tension, there’s opportunity.
Leveraging that tension takes courage.
On the academic face of it, we might all agree with his logic. But putting it into practice—convincing others to invest significant resources behind an idea—is an entirely different matter. Or as Riswold put it,
“I honestly think advertising's desire to be mistake-free comes from its self-sustaining belief that it is extremely important.”
Riswold understood a critical third point: To succeed, advertising has to appeal to its elusive, cynical, distracted audience first and foremost and probably only—not just tell a story the brand thinks is important.
I was fortunate to meet Jim once, briefly, at a One Club creative leaders retreat. He was already battling cancer, and leveraging that tension with brilliant skill.
He was unafraid, and suggested we might try that approach to life, if not our work in advertising.
RIP Jim Riswold.
If you only have time to read one piece about Jim, this interview from The Great Discontent should be it.
But here’s AdAge’s obit. Dan Wieden’s homage is here. Jeff Goodby’s tribute is also very much worth reading.
🤖🔬 I’ll have a separate AI+Creativity post coming out Friday this week.