Nick Law Says You Don’t Have to Hate Advertising

“I’m dry as a nun’s nasty,” Nick Law tells the shocked audience in his opening line. “I can say that because I’m from Australia.” Huge laughs.

Nick Law is from Australia.

Growing up in Australia, Nick learned to hate advertising. He headed to the UK to work at Pentagram, and learned to hate advertising even more. Then he went to work at an advertising agency (DMB&B) and learned to hate graphic designers. And now he works at R/GA, where he’s learned that advertising and design can not only play nice, they can create rich and meaningful experiences that could never have been achieved without the other.

Because its origins are as a production company, R/GA is very good at making things, says Nick. He shows a nice chart going from make to think on the y axis, and story to system on the x-axis. Before, the advertising process would be taking a story and bringing it to life in a method like moviemaking, the work on the internet is more like building massive systems. But the internet can now be home to that conceptual storytelling told within the format of a large, scalable, global system.

He uses Nike+ as a case study because they took a little piece of technology (a chip that can go on your shoe and track your running mileage) and built real life situations around the product (huge urban races with concerts at the end) and connected them through an online platform where users can train using the Nike Plus and track their mileage, find running clubs in their city, and upload their photos. They also produced trash-talking videos with celebs like Kanye West (trash talking? Kanye?) who challenged other celebs to step up their training. It worked: 800,000 people ran in 142 countries. It was a beautiful collaboration between advertising and design; between storytelling and systems. See the whole case study on the R/GA site.

Nick Law talks about RG/A’s That’s Not Cool Campaign

Here’s a project—and a problem—that was probably news to many in the audience. R/GA worked with the Ad Council on the issue of “digital abuse,” where the proliferation of messaging technology and devices among teenagers can lead to teens verbally abusing and sometimes cyberstalking each other (how about this phrase:  “textual assault”). Thatsnotcool.com was launched so teens could start to understand what kind of behavior was appropriate. But they did it in an irreverent way, which used edgy sock puppets, notebook doodle-like ads, and these pretty hilarious commercials featuring a person in a cell phone costume. Again, check out the whole beautiful case study, explained with a perfect blend of storytelling and systems, on R/GA’s site.

Nick Law interviewed by Kurt Andersen