Designer Cheena Jain recently interviewed me for her upcoming book on Design, Media and Creativity.

Cheena:

There are a lot of talented people in advertising.  Why are there so few good ads then?

Richard:

The truth is 94.6% of all of the advertising in the world is designed to make someone’s boss happy.

That’s why 94.6% of all of the advertising in the world sucks.  

Because it wasn’t designed for you and me.

It wasn’t designed to grace our lives, to inspire our imaginations or to put fizz in the culture that we live in.

Cheena:

OK, Mister Fancy Pants, how then did you get sucked into working on Joe Camel?

Richard:

When I first saw Joe Camel, it reminded me of the advertising equivalent of Fritz the Cat, Robert Crumb’s anti-hero. It was sleazy but I also saw that it had “oomph,” impact, a genuine sense of pop creativity.

Cigarette advertising had already begun to be demonized at the time, as had smoking, and I had a contrarian streak, so I decided to check it out. Some would say I had a moral blind spot.  But I’m a libertarian and it’s hard to argue with the right of a legal product to be allowed to advertise.

What intrigued me at Mezzina/Brown was that they looked at their mission as making pop culture on behalf of the brand. And they embraced the fact that they were in a socially questionable category, running ads that are believed to be noxious to the interests of society by its puritan controllers. You had to earn whatever attention you could get. You had to really earn it.

Cheena:

Why is it so hard for advertisers to earn the attention of their audience?

Richard:

The truth is that most advertising is conceived and executed by Soviet-type personalities, not by bold explorers of a free world. Your average corporation doesn’t blow peoples’ brains out in a cellar, they don’t beat people to death and they don’t send them into frozen wastelands to slowly die. But they have the exact same thing in common that the Politburo had, which is an environment of fear.  

FEAR EVERYWHERE! PARALYZING, SUFFOCATING, MIND-DESTROYING FEAR!  

Cheena:

Absolutely. I mean there’s no room for mistakes.

Richard:

When I first watched Nike’s World Cup ad “Write the Future,” it took my breath away and my eyes welled up from the sheer joy of it. 

It’s so indescribably beautiful and every brand, everywhere, is sitting right on the opportunity to do the same thing.

Cheena:

What about blogs?  What’s their place as a medium?

Richard:

It’s all about VOICE.

You go around, you find a tone and a critical outlook that you relate to and bingo you’ve found a blog you like.

And brands can definitely do this if they truly know and understand themselves and have adopted a clear means of being relevant.  Societe Perrier is one I’ve worked on and Nestle is taking it global.  This is going to be a real adventure.

But you know what?

CULTURE IS THE MEDIUM.

And the brand has to learn how to use that medium. 

In other words, it has to create.  It has to have the consent and interplay of what it calls its “target” audience.

It has to engage participants and it has to be present at the fair and do something to lift the pageant and lift the spirits of the people who are there. To help it shine and sparkle. So for a brand to be relevant to a consumer, it has to be part of the consumer’s culture.

You can escape doing that if you want to. Most people won’t notice if you fail to show up. But in the course of my whole life, I’ve only had twenty or thirty times when a brand really meant something to me because they were there at the right time in the right way and they contributed to the story of my life as it progressed.

And you know what makes the great ad agencies special?  Some talent, of course, but other than that, almost nothing at all except this tiny little thing: THEY RESPECT THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM THEY CREATE.

Cheena:

What kind of people should modern brands be looking for to lead their marketing?

Richard:

People that have a Facebook page and use it imaginatively.

That, when they go to parties, people like being around them.

That give great toasts.

That would gladly try karaoke.

That backpacked to Machu Picchu.

That loved and lost.

That loved and won.

That wrote a poem about it…

Cheena:

Richard, it’s always a pleasure.  Thank you.