He Totally Got It

If you’re glad you’re not an Oscar Mayer wiener, you may have Jay Chiat partly to thank. If you can pass by the Charmin on the rack at your local supermarket without reflexively picturing Mr. Whipple plunging his obsessive-compulsive fingers into mounds of toilet tissue, say a quick prayer of gratitude for Chiat.

For it was Chiat, the legendary ad executive and cultural provocateur, who helped rescue American television advertising from terminal silliness, who wrested it from the puerile mind-set of Madison Avenue and gave it a more thoughtful center, a more nuanced, sophisticated sheen. The brain cells he saved may be your own.

But Chiat, who died at age 70 of prostate cancer last month at his Venice home, leaves a far more subtle and complex legacy than this. While American TV advertising has generally consisted of corny sentiments and family-friendly cliches, Chiat and his Los Angeles firm, Chiat/Day, dared to sell products using a bizarre mascot, a manic pink bunny who later morphed into a pop-culture touchstone.

While behemoth corporate firms still relied on silly jingles and simple-minded slogans incessantly pounded home to move products off shelves, Chiat/Day pioneered a mode of expression that was indirect and allusive, disorienting and occasionally unnerving. Images of famous athletes were blown up to the size of buildings and draped across office towers to sell Nike footwear. The noir-ish image of a woman hurling a sledgehammer at an Orwellian authority figure blurred across TV screens at warp speed during the 1984 Super Bowl, leaving viewers scratching their heads and asking, “Whoa! What was that?”

It was, of course, an ad for Apple Macintosh computers, as every business school graduate in America now knows. But it also was a prescient dramatization of the new American worker and a changed American workplace at the dawn of the Information Age.

If the first wave of TV advertising following World War II was designed to teach Americans how to be middle-class consumers, how to fit in, Chiat understood sooner than most that the “new economy” prized the ideals of nonconformity and open-mindedness, at least in theory. Chiat/Day’s preference for the enigmatic over the obvious, the mythical over the mundane, suited a new economic model that purported to be as much about intangible products like “knowledge” and “information” as it was about PCs and cellular phones.

Sometimes, the products in Chiat/Day ads were never actually seen. Corporate logos might be buried in the corner of a billboard. This was advertising as a nonstop Fellini film, a surrealist medium that faintly mocked and, some critics charged, even subverted the commercial imperative of sell, sell, sell!

Throughout his career, Chiat was sensitive to the criticism that his ads were better at stirring the pot than sealing the deal. He once wryly observed, “My real talent was for losing clients,” a blue-chip list that included Honda, Reebok, Apple Computer and Nike. But Chiat/Day shook up an industry that, like the Detroit automakers of the 1970s, had become stuffy and predictable, leaving American advertisers lagging behind their more nimble and innovative foreign counterparts.

“Advertising in the ‘70s and going into the ‘80s had gotten a little conservative,” says Warren Berger, author of “Advertising Today” (Phaidon Press, 2001). “It had become a business of mega-merged giants, corporate giants, and it was producing commercials that weren’t very interesting, ‘ring around the collar’ type commercials. Jay was kind of like the pirate. He wanted to stir up trouble, and he did it.”

Though he was born in the Bronx and spent much of his working life in Manhattan, Chiat (rhymes with Hyatt) has been recognized as the founding philosopher-king of the so-called “West Coast” school of advertising with the firm he launched in 1968. Those of us who make our homes on the eastern cusp of the Pacific have learned to be leery of such designations. Yet in Chiat’s case, “West Coast” is a telling epithet that can shoulder the weight of its own contradictions.

Like the “West Coast jazz” of the 1950s, Chiat’s creative sensibility was cool, intellectual, slightly detached--the visual equivalent of a Chet Baker trumpet solo. At the opposite extreme, Chiat/Day ads could be flashy and explosive, like the quick-strike “West Coast offense” perfected by the San Francisco 49ers football team of the 1980s and ‘90s. And, as if taking a cue from “West Coast rap,” they used sly, topical humor and manifested a sense of cross-cultural awareness that helped cut across ethnic, social and economic boundaries. Chiat/Day ads had street cred. They knew what time it was. And they had attitude to burn.

At the same time, Chiat/Day knew that, conceptually, less can be more. “I think they were very influential when it came to very clean looks, very brief kind of hip images,” says Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners in San Francisco, which developed the “Got Milk?” ad campaign.

In their eye-tickling, cinematic look, Chiat/Day’s TV spots were more like mini-movies than traditional TV ads. And as often as not they were more intelligent and artistic than the televised entertainments they bracketed. Though Chiat often professed disdain for Tinseltown philistines and once claimed that Hollywood had had “less than no impact” on his business, he wasn’t above hiring top-rank industry directors like Ridley Scott, who helmed the “1984” ad.

Marrying Hollywood-grade production values to an absurdist comic streak, Chiat/Day constructed an advertising universe in which image took precedence over text, symbols over slogans. Chiat/Day ads helped teach the consuming masses to think in pictures, to interpret the world hyper-textually and by free association. Chiat could manipulate hearts and minds with the best of ‘em, but he treated his customers as intelligent adults, not perpetual adolescents.

Chiat “let the viewer or the reader finish the ad. [He] let them connect the dots,” says Lawrence R. Samuel, author of “Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream” (University of Texas Press, 2001). “He understood that baby boomers were very savvy visually, that we were brought up on television.”

Chiat/Day caught the irreverent spirit of the times (circa 1985-90), when “Spy” magazine was on newsstands, the “Naked Gun” movies were in cineplexes and rap acts like the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC were concocting hip-hop songs that, like Chiat/Day, cleverly spoofed commercial culture while simultaneously celebrating it as a form of pop art (remember “Cookie Puss” and “My Adidas?”).

When Chiat/Day co-opted Randy Newman’s ironic anthem “I Love L.A.” to promote Nike for the 1984 Summer Olympics, the ads crystallized a vision of the city as a mature, self-critical metropolis, not the laid-back La-La Land of the East Coast imagination. Like the avant-garde director Peter Sellars, another creative powerhouse who first made his mark on L.A. during that Olympic summer with the Los Angeles Festival, Chiat saw L.A. in a way the city was not yet able to see itself.

An enthusiastic art patron, Chiat presided over the blurring of art and commerce, but he recognized that the exchange could work both ways. Art, architecture and design could elevate commercial culture. “Commercializing” needn’t be a synonym for dumbing down. “It was part of his DNA to encourage new ideas and to challenge the status quo, in any medium,” says Richard Koshalek, former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and now president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

He also recognized the extent to which television advertising, always something of a world unto itself, had become increasingly self-referential and self-contained; that the various components of TV entertainment--from news programs to soap operas to commercials and promos--formed a seamless visual habitat where everything was free to move about and inter-breed. Though the Energizer Bunny, perhaps the most recognizable advertising icon of the past 15 years, actually was created by the Chicago office of DDB Needham Worldwide, Chiat/Day expanded the idea, turning the lapin hipster loose to invade other commercials.

Above all, Chiat appreciated that the world economy was changing, and modes of visual representation had to change with it. In a 1999 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Chiat described himself as “a frustrated architect.” But in a crucial sense he was an architect who constructed his business around the perception that advertising was an inescapable part of our environment, as much a part of the postmodern landscape as asphalt and skyscrapers.

To walk down the street in any major American city, or cruise a suburban commercial strip, or fly by an interstate exit graced by a glowing pair of golden arches is to understand a basic truth of contemporary American life that Chiat grasped intuitively and exploited brilliantly: It’s an advertiser’s world. The rest of us just live in it.

“Working with Jay was fun because he was open to ideas, and you could play, and he was a good critic, and he drove me nuts because he was always pushing me, and he would say nasty things like, ‘Is that all you could do?’ ‘Can’t we do better?’” says Frank Gehry, a longtime friend who designed Chiat/Day’s former Venice headquarters, popularly known as the “binoculars building” after the huge Claes Oldenburg sculpture that serves as its entrance.

“It was a manifestation of his persona and the way he egged people on and the kind of ideas he was willing to entertain without editing,” Gehry says. Chiat, he adds, was a “very special kind of person that you can free-associate with, that is intuitively inspiring. I don’t think he planned where he was going.”

Now advertising may be groping again for its sense of direction, as innovative boutique firms are swallowed up by huge agencies and quirky, self-conscious ads are the rule, not the exception. (In 1995, Chiat himself sold his agency to the mega Omnicom Group Inc., which absorbed it into its TBWA Advertising unit.) Chiat/Day “made advertising hip,” says Berger. “But it’s been hip for about 10 years. Now there’s a sense of ‘OK, what’s the next big move or the next big leap for the industry to make?’ And there’ a sense that they’re going to need a Jay Chiat to make it happen.”