Walk in any subway station in NYC and you’ll see Diesel’s current campaign BE STUPID. And maybe it’s exactly what their creative agency of choice Anomaly banked on, but it had me rooting for stupid too. Maybe it was the multiplatform campaign, which no doubt cost a pretty penny (not to mention an all expense paid trip across Mongolia by train or if you prefer shark swimming in South Africa) but the campaign struck a chord with me. Mainly, because I’ve recently taken a contract corporate gig, I now know what it means to die a little each day. Yes, I had some doubts from the beginning, but I also had high hopes, believing I could play a pivotal role in a redesign, rethinking how an e-commerce site functioned anew, but what I’ve discovered is something else entirely, something which spoke to the first lines of Diesel’s campaign copy “Like balloons we are all filled with hopes and dreams but over time a single sentence creeps into our live…Don’t be stupid. It’s the crusher of possibility.” And maybe e-commerce isn’t necessarily the place for experimentation and online innovation but it should be.
I’ve grappled with how to move forward and perhaps I found my answer at AIGA’s recent NYC event on Design and Advertising when an audience member told a humorous story and asked a poignant question. During the talk Doug Jaegar, the youngest to ever be elected President of the Art Director’s Club, had thrown up on screen a series of interesting one liners from various professionals in the industry about design and advertising. To quote a few, which lose a lot without the visual but none-the-less here they are: From an ad agency – “Design is the bass line, advertising is the guitar solo.” From a design group – “Advertising creates problems, design creates solutions.” Even Todd Waterbury of Wieden+Kennedy, had one to eloquently contribute, “Design is a language, advertising a sentence.” Well, our audience member being in pharmaceutical advertising, asked “while everything you’ve said makes sense, my client isn’t gonna hear ‘design is a language, advertising a sentence’ and see the error of their ways. What two minute elevator pitch can I use with a client to get them to not want to put a generic smiling, healthy looking patient on a poster with the drug name and legal copy?” It got more than a few laughs but it was a very good question. The answer via Doug Jaegar,”maybe you should quit your job.” I think his point being that you will always have battles to fight, working with people who appreciate ideas shouldn’t have to be one of them.
