October 15, 2024

Irreverence. Justified.

A post about the irresistible truths of Nike and the Sex Pistols.

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Perfection?

This isn’t my favourite ad. I’m not sure it’s even a great ad. But it’s a near-perfect example of the craft.

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Irreverence. Justified.

You simply must read this email and SMS conversation between Dave Dye and Jim Riswold (RIP). As Dye says, plenty of people in advertising like to think that they’re creating culture; Jim Riswold did. The post is both a history lesson and a treasure-trove of brilliant Riswold ads, mostly Nike, including the one above.

I wonder what the planner behind this expected when they wrote the brief and briefed it in. The creative team was given both too little and too much to work with. Too little in the form of a stipulation that the shoe must be the hero; the image will be a packshot. Too much in the form of unpromising mandatory product features like Durathane and Durabuck.

Imagine the surprise and delight when this concept was presented in the creative review meeting. Product features, emotional benefit, and a compelling brand truth seamlessly woven into a whole that is more, much more, than the sum of its parts.

This is what can happen when you give a workaday brief to a genius who has no concept of going through the motions just to get a job off his desk.

It’s this quality of work from unpromising briefs that makes me roll my eyes when people glibly say that ‘everyone’s creative.’

But none of this explains why I’m writing about an ad on a Saturday morning. It stopped me in my tracks for a different reason.

Endurance and transcendence

The headline has a kind of mythical quality for me. I remember hearing, back in the day, that Irreverence Justified was the proposition on the brief for all Just Do It advertising.

So maybe this one-off ad for a pair of sneakers was the inadvertent genesis of the creative strategy for one of the most famous campaigns of all time. That’s probably a fanciful notion, but it’s one I’ll cling to until disabused by someone in the know.

When I heard about Irreverence Justified, it was the first time I realised that there was such a thing as a persistent brand idea or brand proposition. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me that an idea could have this transcendent quality and endure beyond a campaign of several executions.

It’s the Holy Grail for an agency to be the author of this kind of creative thinking. Enduring brand ideas are the stuff of balance sheet intangible assets. Forget your poxy brand health measures, these ideas affect company valuations. They cement client/agency relationships in the C-Suite stratosphere.

Stylish and substantial

This kind of upstream thinking is packaged in various ways for various audiences and various uses: some internal and strategic, some public-facing and creative.

You have your Brand Idea, your Brand Proposition, your Organising Idea, your Brand Essence, and so on.

The concept of a ‘North Star’ is very much in vogue these days, but it’s a loose, ill-defined concept. A corporate North Star is as likely to be a set of values as anything I’d recognise as a proposition or a narrative idea.

Clients are often tempted to include all of these (and more) in their brand framework, which is ok as long as there’s clear daylight between the purpose of each component, and as long as people know what they’re doing. But if you have too many moving parts in your brand strategy it’s easy to create internal contradictions and confuse things. You end up with a shanty brand.

Irresistible truth

I’ve adopted the idea of a brand’s ‘irresistible truth’ for the work that I do, mainly with service organisations that have a b2b business model.

The buyers of b2b services buy style as well as substance. They buy into as much as they buy from. They buy into the way a company does business. They buy into its culture, its character.

So I like an irresistible truth that combines substance and style, scarce utility and distinctive character. Irreverence Justified does just that. As the proposition behind the Just Do It campaign it’s the deceptively simple recipe for advertising that’s all about performance.

The functional performance of Nike products is always there and it can be dialled down or dialled up, from implicit enabler to explicit hero as in the ad above. But the deep appeal of Nike advertising comes from its performative nature; the grace and flair of the athletes; the irreverence and chutzpah of the brand.

Those two words, Irreverence Justified, carry a lot of weight.

The shared DNA of Nike and The Sex Pistols

There’s a ‘dance like no one’s watching’ vibe to Just Do It. If you’re going to just do it, you can’t be held back by conformity or convention or caring what other people think of you. Just Do It is unfettered and often anarchic. Take a look at the Spike Lee and Bugs Bunny ads in the Dye/Riswold post.

So, while they’re separated by more than they have in common, I’d say that Nike and The Sex Pistols share the genes for anarchy and not caring.

And I’d argue that ‘we don’t care’ was (is) the irresistible truth of the Pistols.

It’s a truth they tell repeatedly in the lyrics of Pretty Vacant. And it’s a truth they lived by on and off stage.

They didn’t care about using the F-word on mainstream TV. They didn’t care who they upset. They didn’t particularly care about musicianship. And they really didn’t care what you thought of them.

They didn’t care for the games people play to make themselves popular. It wasn’t their job to impress you, it was your job to impress them, which was almost impossible. Not caring was the source of their charisma.

You could argue that this lack of care was more of a cynical veneer than a deep truth, particularly in the case of the band’s architect/mentor, Malcolm McLaren. But then again, even the cynicism was delivered with a brazen lack of care for how it might seem. There was full transparency in the form of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and the idea of making cash from chaos.

‘We don’t care’ was both the substance and the style of the Sex Pistols.

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The very best and we don’t care

I say to my clients that their irresistible truth should encapsulate them at their very best.

Whoever named the Pistols’ Japanese compilation album knew this. They called it The Very Best of Sex Pistols and We Don’t Care. They’re basically saying that the very best of Sex Pistols is ‘We Don’t Care’. The message could hardly be clearer.

The image of the album (above) is from its Discogs listing. It’s worth clicking the ‘More images’ link under the thumbnail image of the record cover to enjoy both the ‘we don’t care’ aesthetic and the Japanese accoutrements, including the cardboard obi strip much beloved of Simon White at Unspun Heroes.

Stoopid is better than smart

In a text reply to Dave Dye on 17th March 2024, Jim Riswold includes the Sex Pistols in a short list of British influences on his work.

It seems this ‘we don’t care’ gene is dominant rather than recessive in culture makers: Nike, Sex Pistols, and now Jim Riswold.

Dye asks Riswold why he thinks stoopid is better than smart. And there’s an irresistible, we-don’t-care truth to his answer.

Start every day stupid. If you start every day stupid you start every day without inhibition and inhibition is creativity’s kryptonite.

Creativity demands making a fool out of yourself. You cannot be creative unless you are willing to walk around with your pants around your ankles.

Jim Riswold in answer to Dave Dye’s question, ‘You say that stoopid is better than smart, why?’