Jim Riswold, a visionary and irreverent adman whose playful and occasionally provocative Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Bo Jackson redrew the playing field for product endorsements and propelled athletic footwear into the cultural stratosphere, died on Aug. 9 at his home in Portland, Ore. He was 66.
Mr. Riswold, who had fought various forms of cancer for two decades, announced his death on Instagram in a statement posted by his children that said, “Okay, I’m dead now.” His family said the cause was interstitial lung disease exacerbated by metastatic prostate cancer.
Described by colleagues and even competitors as an “idiot savant” and the Michael Jordan of advertising, Mr. Riswold was an exasperating man who occasionally credited himself — accurately, it turns out — with revolutionizing television commercials, turning them into a form of entertainment often more absorbing than the shows they interrupted.
“Jim had this incredible sense of how you can meld advertising and culture together and make it truthful and entertaining,” Susan Hoffman, his longtime colleague at Wieden+Kennedy, the global ad agency founded in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. “He was brilliant. You never wanted to tell him that, though.”
Mr. Riswold said that his success in advertising derived, in part, from his belief that advertising was trivial.
“When you come to the realization that advertising is not that important — baked beans are more important — it allows you to drop the pretense and make better advertising,” he told The Financial Times this year.
The many commercials Mr. Riswold created for Nike are considered advertising masterpieces.
In the “Bo Knows” commercials for cross-training shoes, Bo Jackson, who played both football and baseball professionally, is depicted playing multiple sports — “Bo knows baseball,” “Bo knows football,” “Bo knows running” — interspersed with scenes of Bo Diddley jamming on his guitar. At the end, Mr. Jackson tries the guitar. The other Bo says, “Bo, you don’t know Diddley.”
With “Hello World,” Tiger Woods addresses golf’s racial barriers. “I’ve heard I’m not ready for you,” he says. “Are you ready for me?”
Mr. Riswold’s most memorable commercials were the ones he made for Nike’s Air Jordans, especially the “Spike and Mike” ads starring Mr. Jordan, the Chicago Bulls star, and Spike Lee, the actor and director.
How the two wound up in a commercial together is a curious story.
In 1986, Mr. Riswold was watching “She’s Gotta Have It,” Mr. Lee’s breakthrough film, which he wrote, directed and starred in. He played Mars Blackmon, a New York Knicks fan.
“I have this character, and he’s so in love with his Air Jordans that he leaves them on when he’s making love,” Mr. Lee said in an interview, still laughing at the premise. “And here’s the thing — he never took them off. They were still tied.”
When Mr. Riswold saw the movie, he later said, “it was like, that’s an idea, that’s an advertising campaign.” He signed Mr. Lee to play Mars in a series of commercials in which Mr. Jordan playfully mocks the shoe superfan. (Mr. Lee directed the ads.)
In one of the early commercials, Mr. Lee’s character says, “Yo, Mars Blackmon here with my main man, Michael Jordan.”
They are on a basketball court. Mars is wearing a bicycle hat with “Brooklyn” written on it, holding a basketball and looking diminutive next to Michael.
“Yo, Mike,” Mars says. “What makes you the best player in the universe? Is it the vicious dunks?”
“No, Mars,” Michael says.
“Is it the haircut?”
“No, Mars.”
“Is it the shoes?”
“No, Mars.”
“Is it the extra-long shorts?”
“No, Mars.”
Mars is flustered.
“Money, it’s gotta be the shoes,” Mars says, holding a pair of Air Jordans up to his face. “Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. Shoes. You sure it’s not the shoes?”
Before the “Spike and Mike” commercials, athletic-shoe endorsements were mostly sweaty and straightforward, with the endorsee hustling around in a brand’s product looking sporty and fabulous. Mr. Riswold’s innovation was to make them character-driven. The series unfolded in more than a dozen commercials over 16 years.
“I think that they were important in that they’re not any great comedic endeavors,” Mr. Riswold later wrote of the commercials in a company blog post, “but that they were the first time they showed a human side of the athlete, and used humor, and had some fun with popular culture.”
That was in direct opposition to a prevailing theory of marketing: The product is the star. Mr. Riswold challenged that assumption further by pairing Mr. Jordan with Bugs Bunny in other Nike commercials.
“No amount of research would have told you that any of these ads would have been successful,” Mr. Riswold wrote this year in Ad Age magazine. “In fact, it would have told you, in great detail, in lots of meetings, with lots of fancy geometrical shapes, precisely why they would not be successful.”
And yet they were.
“Jim put Nike, Michael and myself into the stratosphere,” Mr. Lee said. “He made us.”
James Paul Riswold was born on Dec. 7, 1957, in Seattle. His father, Paul, worked as a purchasing agent for several local companies. His mother, Paularose (James) Riswold, worked in catering.
Bullied both physically and verbally in high school, he found solace studying satirists like Jonathan Swift, Eugène Ionesco and Voltaire. He also became obsessed with Monty Python, the British comedy troupe.
At the University of Washington, he earned degrees in communications, philosophy and history in 1983.
The next year, he joined Wieden+Kennedy, then a nascent firm, as its first copywriter. His early work for Honda scooters featured Lou Reed.
Mr. Riswold was a handful. He noted with pride that he was kicked off the Nike account at least seven times for his impolitic behavior. He sometimes fired off companywide emails bemoaning companywide emails.
“I do not have any tickets for any upcoming concerts,” he wrote in one 1,465-word missive. “I do not want any tickets for any upcoming concerts. I don’t want a roommate. You don’t want me as a roommate.”
Mr. Riswold’s marriage to Melinda Linville in 1988 ended in divorce. He is survived by his children, Hallie and Jake Riswold, and his sisters, Sheila Roe and Marilee Hooper.
In 2000, Mr. Riswold was diagnosed with leukemia. He retired from Wieden+Kennedy in 2005 and began a second career as a satirical artist. In scenes created and photographed by him, he poked fun at towering figures.
A tiny Adolf Hitler figure rides in a big toy car in “The Hitlermobile.” In “Will You Be My Valentine, Chairman Mao?” the Chinese leader’s face appears on a large heart surrounded by smaller heart-shaped candies. For Mr. Riswold, the work was a kind of metaphorical anvil, a way to pound another tyrant: cancer.
Mr. Riswold also turned himself into art. He posed naked in photographs, his body ravaged by cancer.
“Creativity demands making a fool out of yourself,” he told Fast Company magazine. “You cannot be creative unless you are willing to walk around with your pants around your ankles. I love walking around with my pants around my ankles. But that’s a different story.”
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