He Wrote Like A God.
How Wieden + Kennedy, Nike and 20 years with cancer turned Jim Riswold into one beautifully creative mind.
Jim Riswold is dying. He has cancer. He’s given the finger to the miserable bastard for a very long time. But cancer is a tenacious beast and Jim might not have many more birds to flip. It’s terminal. He knows it. What he also knows is a kind of creativity that we rarely see anymore. At least, in advertising. If you’re in this business, you understand. I heard a cool segment on NPR this morning about Supercommunicators. People who have an almost preternatural sense of empathy, an ability to deeply listen to people, what they need, what they feel. Immediately, I thought of Jim. Jim, the creative savant. Jim, the supercommuicator. I have very few creative heroes. And I mean very few. Jim is one of them. So when Joshua Hunt wrote this piece, there was no way I could not share it with all of you.
Part 1
One afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, Jim Riswold rolled his wheelchair across the threshold of a downtown gallery in Portland, Oregon, where his exhibition Two Wars in One was opening. The show consisted of two collections, “Putin’s Big Parade” and “The (Un)Civil War”, examining global empire and race relations through the lens of absurdist iconography: plaster death masks for the abolitionist John Brown and the fictional pancake syrup spokesperson Aunt Jemima; Russian president Vladimir Putin reimagined as a child’s doll holding a sunflower between its teeth; and a photograph of toy soldiers flying the flag of the US Confederate Army over drumsticks spilling out from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Riswold, who is 66, has lived with leukemia for more than two decades, long enough that it’s sometimes hard to imagine the cancer might ever get around to killing him. This was not one of those times. The artist and advertising industry legend appeared gaunt and frail. His presence was made possible by morphine and a portable oxygen tank that helped him breathe long enough to schmooze and soak up whatever accolades were on offer.
“It took me four years of work, hard work, to do that show,” Riswold told me. “I wasn’t going to miss out on all the praise or the fireworks.” To improve his odds of surviving encounters with art collectors, friends and colleagues from the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency, a sign posted at the gallery’s entrance read: “Putin Says Wear a Mask or Riswold Dies!”
It reminded me of our first meeting, in February 2022, when Riswold welcomed me into his high-rise condominium with a bit of gallows humour about how contracting Covid-19 could only improve the state of his lungs. Over and over, he invited me to remove my mask while we talked about his long career at Wieden+Kennedy, where he was the first copywriter hired by co-founder Dan Wieden in 1984.
Riswold’s achievements are significant enough that one is tempted to dive into his Wikipedia listing mid-conversation to see that he isn’t making anything up. And yet, even at his most egotistical, Riswold’s appraisal of his own career is modest compared with how he’s regarded by peers. Wieden, who authored what may be the world’s most famous advertising slogan — “Just Do It” — nevertheless declared that “Riswold wrote like a god” for Nike.
His long road to deification (and a stint as creative-director) at the Portland ad agency started with Honda, whose scooters Riswold sold by courting a new kind of celebrity spokesperson: Lou Reed. Miles Davis. Grace Jones. Then came the Nike account and a series of ad campaigns that helped transform a sports shoe company into a multibillion-dollar brand.
In 1982, when Nike signed with W+K, its annual sales were $694mn. Nearing the end of the decade, sales were $1.2bn. Last year, they exceeded $50bn. During his decades-long tenure as what he called a “carnival barker” at W+K, Riswold helped transform the advertising business by using “the athlete, the sweat and the product” to create the only thing that mattered, which, he said, is making “a really good commercial”.
What’s increasingly hard to explain to anyone too young to remember those days is just how provocative and culturally significant “a really good commercial” could be in the 1980s and ’90s. “Riswold and early Wieden work stood out like a middle finger aimed at traditional advertising,” said Andrew Miller, who has worked on Nike ads with tennis star Naomi Osaka and footballer Cristiano Ronaldo as part of a younger generation of copywriters at W+K. “You couldn’t wait for the ads to come on back then. They blurred the line between the sexiness of music videos and the spectacle of Hollywood. All while having something to say that made you laugh, think, feel.”
Riswold and early Wieden work stood out like a middle finger aimed at traditional advertising Andrew Miller, copywriter Sometimes this blurring of lines was obvious. Putting the filmmaker Spike Lee in front of the camera alongside basketball star Michael Jordan, for example, came to Riswold and his producer when they noticed Lee’s character in “She’s Gotta Have It” refused to take off his Nike sneakers while having sex. Another ad paired “Air” Jordan with Bugs Bunny, Riswold’s “childhood hero”, who becomes “Hare Jordan” after pulling on a pair of Nike basketball shoes. Together they win a pick-up game while throwing pies and playing pranks on competitors who are clearly unfamiliar with the logic of the Looney Tunes universe.
His most inspired and successful team-up, however, was also his riskiest bet he ever made on behalf of what’s now the world’s most valuable fashion brand. Michael Jordan, Jim Riswold and Joe Pytka in 1986.
“No amount of research would’ve come up with pairing Bo Diddley and Bo Jackson in a commercial,” Riswold told me. The resulting campaign, set to Diddley’s guitar music, managed to celebrate the hype surrounding Jackson’s status as an elite sporting all-rounder (“Bo knows baseball. Bo knows football … ”) while showing the athlete’s sense of humor by ending on a line from the music legend: “Bo, you don’t know Diddley”.
It “turned the advertising world upside down,” according to Riswold, and illustrates a key difference between marketing and advertising. “A marketing company would go: ‘Well, kids don’t know who Bo Diddley is, you’ve got to put a modern musician in there,’” Riswold said, while advertisers instead opt to “make something so cool that you’re going to want to find out who Bo Diddley is”.
This was in some ways a reinvention of the celebrity advertising that’s been a mainstay since the 1700s, when Wedgwood dedicated one of its tea sets to Queen Charlotte. Instead of merely matching a product with a famous face, “Riswold and W+K’s advertising spoke in cultural truths,” Miller told me. “Whether it was putting Tiger Woods against the backdrop of prevailing racism in America” by pointing out that there were still US golf courses that would not admit him or Michael Jordan, considered the greatest basketball player of all time, “lauding the importance of failure”.
Transforming those cultural truths into hype also required enormous budgets. Ahead of its unveiling during the 1989 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, Riswold said, Nike’s “Bo Knows” commercial was announced with its own print advertisement in the New York Times — an ad for the advertising, not the brand itself. It paid off as the commercial ended up following a lead-off home run from Jackson that earned him praise from former President Ronald Reagan, watching the game from the commentator’s box alongside announcer Vin Scully.
“We overtook Reebok after Bo,” Riswold told me. “Up until then, Reebok sold more shoes in the United States than Nike.” Nike was still widely known as a running shoe company when it first signed with W+K in 1982, the same year the firm was founded by Wieden and David Kennedy.
But its path towards reinventing sports advertising cut straight through the dark centre of the zeitgeist: Wieden’s inspiration for the Nike slogan “Just Do It” was the final statement murderer Gary Gilmore offered to his executioners before dying by firing squad in 1977. The company has crafted just about every truly memorable Nike campaign since, while also making ads for Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft — companies that came to W+K for ideas and panache rather than exhaustive market research and catchy jingles.
Part 2, this Thursday.