MasterClass: Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein Teach Advertising And Creativity
On the definition of advertising…
Jeff Goodby: “Advertising, in the biggest sense, is a corporate-funded study of what people love and hate and think is beautiful. And we get people to pay us money to study that stuff. Amazing!”
Rich Silverstein: “I don’t come from a point of you that it’s even advertising. I come into it with… I want to tell you a story. And it will be represented by the brand. We understand it’s commerce. It’s art serving capitalism… We want to be artists in a business world.”
Goodby offers a quote from the advertising legend Howard Gossage, one of his greatest heroes in the business: “People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s advertising.”
Trailer for “The Socrates of San Francisco”, a documentary about the life of Howard Gossage.
Rich: “Advertising is so fluid that there’s no consistency that this is what you should be doing. It’s ever-evolving. Except for storytelling. And telling the truth. And doing something with heart. That’s forever.”
My thoughts:
Despite being regarded by many as suspect, morally compromised and exploitative, good advertising represents a fundamentally virtuous (or at least a fair-trade) cultural exchange. The ad has to earn your attention by having something interesting to say, by telling you a story in a very short space of time that will lodge in your mind. A single fluffy piece of popcorn. Chewed and swallowed in a flash but leaving behind a toothsome, buttery aftertaste. Advertising is a street performer who earns the currency of your attention by doing something genuinely surprising or transporting out of the mundane.
Advertising and mainstream commercial art (music, film, whatever medium you like) bear notable similarities. Both ask the audience to vote with their disposable income. Or simply with their positive regard if social validation is the artist’s objective. The ability to measure the monetary success or reach/engagement of a particular work demonstrates how efficiently a cultural artefact has tapped into the psychological circuitry of human beings. Beauty, mystery, a good story. All art made public is a bid for attention of some kind.
“Can’t Touch This” (Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Client: Cheeto’s)
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On the importance of cultivating inspiration through habitual exposure to culture…
Rich: “Jeff and I are students of the world – of music, of theatre, of art, of food... Appreciating everything there is in the world and using that.”
Jeff: “Appreciation is a really good word because if you’re appreciating the things around you and communicating that to people, people will listen to you.”
My thoughts:
I love this suggestion that marketing can be motivated from a place of generosity. Like cultural magpies collecting small yet beautiful shiny objects in order to feather a nest for the audience, the advertiser curates (and occasionally, in exceptional circumstances, even creates culture).
This calls to mind all the curation of art that I did as a magazine journalist, listening to new music, playing video games, etc, and making decisions about what I wanted to recommend to readers. Isn’t that a kind of propaganda, after all? Was I not advertising those artists’ products to our readership? When a marketing department put a quote of mine on a game box or a musician’s tour poster, were we not both engaged in the same occupation?
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On the quest for excellence and obsessing over how to improve one’s creative output…
Rich during an acceptance speech at Cannes Lions ceremony: “We’re so hard on ourselves, it’s crazy. I know I could improve this too (points at his printed speech). I’m trying (laughs). I’m gonna rewrite it.”
Jeff offscreen in a separate part of the episode: “What am I doing? The usual. Just trying to make the greatest advertising in the whole fucking world.”
“Cool Ranch” (Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Client: Doritos)
My thoughts:
Reminds me of the old proverb about the furniture maker who gets asked, “How do you know when a piece you’re working on is finished?” To which he replies, “It’s never finished. The customer just comes and takes it away from me at a certain point.”
The obsession with constant iteration and improvement is apparent with these pair (and presumably, by extension, the culture of their 300-person firm). We can always do better, there are always avenues to improving the work. The audience is typically only treated to the final product and doesn’t get to see the dozens or even hundreds of evolutionary steps between the single-celled organism of the idea and its final form.