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 leukaemia 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 there 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.”
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. (The ad would eventually lead to the incoherent collision of intellectual properties known as Space Jam, which Riswold called “a terrible movie” and “the greatest extension of bullshit that ever came out of something Wieden+Kennedy and Nike did together”.) 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.
“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 humour 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.
With Kennedy’s death in October 2021, and Dan Wieden’s less than a year later, the eulogies all but closed the book on a period that redefined sports marketing. And yet, even as big ideas gave way to big data, the cultural influence of W+K’s glory years has persisted in pop culture as defiantly as Riswold has clung to the advertising profession. In a recent interview for entertainment magazine Variety, Spike Lee told the actor and director Bradley Cooper about how Riswold and his colleague Bill Davenport had cast him in his series of Nike commercials alongside Michael Jordan. When Tiger Woods announced he was ending his decades-long partnership with Nike in January, it was Riswold who bade farewell to the golf legend in an advertisement for the brand published in The New York Times: “It was a hell of a round, Tiger,” he wrote, alongside a photo evoking the 1996 “Hello World” commercial that heralded the start of Woods’s professional career.
When I spoke to Riswold the day after the Times ad ran, its promise as a metaphorical device for my story was never far from my mind. If we talked long enough about putting old business to rest in the twilight of a brilliant career, the emotional resonance of his illness would shine through. Then near the end, out of nowhere, Riswold asked if I knew just how sick he was, and before I could manage a thoughtful reply, he told me he was dying.
Riswold has described his careers in advertising and art, respectively, as “selling people things they don’t need” and “making things people don’t want”. The common thread binding these endeavours is an obsession with iconography and the cult of personality. On the walls of his condo, which is a short walk from the hospital where his oncologist works, original Andy Warhol prints featuring Mao Zedong and George Armstrong Custer hang near some Benito Mussolini welcome mats designed by Riswold. Atop his refrigerator, a small balloon dog by Jeff Koons sits on a pile of junk mail.
When Riswold was a child living in Seattle, the iconography of the athlete was, for him, all about biography. “As a kid growing up collecting baseball cards, my favourite part of the baseball card was not the statistics,” Riswold told me. Rather, he said, it was turning a card over and learning about how a baseball player like Ted Williams had fought in two wars. Later, in the television age, biography gave way to personality. Instead of telling fans who an athlete was, Riswold and his colleagues chose to exaggerate their character and behaviour: Charles Barkley’s trash talking earned him a Nike campaign in which he famously declared “I am not a role model”, while another basketball player David Robinson, “the nicest guy in the world” according to Riswold, starred in commercials parodying the children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Their formula was so effective that it sparked an enduring argument between the advertising agency and its top client. Nike’s co-founder Phil Knight, said Riswold, always insisted that the shoe was more important than the athlete, while Riswold maintained the opposite was true. To appease the client, he made sure they always filmed two different spots for campaigns like the one starring Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. One featured Lee’s character “blabbing about Michael, the man”, while the other was “about Jordan, the shoe”.
Diplomacy did not come naturally to Riswold, who operated on the assumption that he was being paid for his opinion. His “ego” and “big mouth” got him kicked off the Nike account seven times, he said. Every so often, Nike would shake things up by hiring a different ad agency, but in the end it would always look back to W+K, which seemed to be uniquely suited to what Riswold saw as the “chaos” that drove the men running Nike.
The difference between marketing and advertising, Riswold told me, is that “marketers go to school”. But in his time teaching at W+K’s own experimental school for advertising, he said, the hardest lesson to impart was that advertising is an ugly business. “This is capitalism writ large,” Riswold told me. “No less than Karl Marx said advertising was a maggot of capitalism. In other words, advertising people, we’re all maggots.”
This is not necessarily a generational critique of his former students from Riswold, who professed admiration for the millennial con artist Anna Delvey, the subject of a Netflix drama that had recently been released when I met him in 2022. His fascination with Delvey made perfect sense to me in the context of his admiration for Wieden and Kennedy, who “had from day one a rather cynical view of advertising”. This didn’t mean that you make cynical advertising, he said, but that you view the job as an opportunity to “have fun and make some money”. Delvey too seemed to relish the fame and opportunities her antics brought her.
“Advertising has grown more complicated,” Miller told me. “There is more data and research than ever before. But just because you know what your customer had for lunch and who they follow on TikTok, doesn’t mean you know how to inspire them or make them remember you. That can only come from somewhere human and instinctual. Trusting the gut of a singular voice like Riswold is hard to translate into [return on investment] and language that accountants can understand.”
My recent conversations with Riswold were aimed at grappling with what it will mean for our culture when the maggots of the advertising profession retreat from the carcass and into the soil. What will be lost when the last carnival barker is succeeded by programmatic advertising that speaks not to us but to the digital shadows we cast? What will be broken when the social media influencer — fleshy avatar of the digital advertising ecosystem — masters the art of selling fast fashion as liberal virtue? It’s a thought that came to me by way of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Shards, in which the narrator speculates that the decline of the serial killer as a social phenomenon has everything to do with the rise of the mass shooter.
If this sounds like a half-formed thought, it’s because we never got around to navigating this morbidly fascinating territory. Instead, Riswold told me his cancer had been deemed terminal in September and that he was more interested in talking about art. He still loved advertising, he assured me, and he is still working at W+K. But after learning he may soon die, Riswold was glad that he’d dedicated so much time to what would become the exhibition, Two Wars in One. That work, and the show itself, he said, has brought him a deep sense of peace and contentment.
“I think it’s the best show I’ve ever done,” he told me. And though it sprang from the same creative well as his advertising work, and is steeped in the same cynicism, Riswold’s art is different in its possibilities; something I realised while thinking back on our first conversation, when he explained the secret to making good advertising. “When you come to the realisation that advertising is not that important — baked beans are more important — it allows you to drop the pretence and make better advertising,” he said. “Because it’s just advertising.”
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