Where you a naughty kid?I wasn’t a naughty kid; I was a wimpy kid. My nickname was Pipsqueak. Pipsqueak is not a term of endearment. Please move me to where it is a term of endearment. Call me Lord of the Pipsqueaks. All hail.Perpetual student?I spent seven years slumming around the University of Washington, picking up history, philosophy and communications degrees. First, I wanted to be a lawyer but got scared away from law school by the movie The Paper Chase. “Fuck, I’m not fucking smart enough for that,” I told myself. Then I wanted to be a Nietzsche scholar but was neither smart nor insane enough. “Fuck, I’m not fucking smart enough for that,” I told myself again. Then I stumbled into the advertising program in the communications department. “Fuck, I might be fucking smart enough for this,” I told myself.What ads made an impression on the short-trousered Riz?Ads didn’t make an impression upon me, but people did.In 1972, at the very impressionable age of 14, I saw my first rock concert.A friend of mine had invited me to see a then relatively, if not completely, unknown musician from England named David Bowie.He was definitely unknown to me, not because it was Mr. Bowie’s first tour of the United States and he was unknown to all but the extremely hip, but because I was the single most unhip teenager in the Pacific Northwest. I had exactly one record in my music collection, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and the only Bowie I’d ever heard of died at the Alamo and had a knife posthumously named in his honor.Like I said, I was impressionable and, therefore, things changed after that concert. The Charge of the Light Brigade was replaced by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Posters of Willie Stargell and Gump Worsley that adorned my room were discarded for every image of a dress-wearing man with orange hair I could get my hands on.Bugs Bunny was a close second. Walt Disney’s Mickey et al comforted kids; Bugs et al made people laugh. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats rock. Laughing beats comfort.I suppose if you put a gun to my head and made pick an ad, I’d go with anything with the Burger King king in it. I want to wear that giant king head. It’s good to be the King and you’re perpetually stoned. I’m forever grateful I don’t have to hang out with my insurance agent, i.e. Jake from State Farm, forever and a day. WIEDEN + KENNEDY.Nike.

Speedo.

HONDA.

Risks and rewards.My motto has always been “make glorious mistakes.” Think of it this way: If you research what a kid wants in a cake, the research will tell you he wants a cake made entirely of icing; after all, icing is the best part. You can’t go wrong with an all-icing cake! The kid will get his guaranteed-not-wrong cake made of icing and that cake will make him throw up. Moral of the story: It’s okay, even good sometimes, to be wrong.For instance, I have been told by people who have nothing better to do than write about advertising that I came to it from an odd background, but only if you consider a college degree in Philosophy and membership in the American Hegelian Society and a fondness for 19^th century German philosophers odd. To wit:Riswold’s campaigns may have created more American icons than anyone since Walt Disney. You would not, however, suspect it by looking at him…Riswold looks more like the seven-year philosophy undergrad he once was at the University of Washington than one of the most powerful forces in American advertising.And:Jim Riswold is the only ad copywriter ever to make Newsweek’s list of the 100 most influential people in America. And if God made Michael Jordan, then Riswold made Michael Jordan God. Graying hair shorn nearly to the scalp, Riswold looks, in his dark glasses and overcoat, more like someone hired to teach you German philosophy, or to put a bullet in you. Or maybe both.Flattering hyperbole, yes, but I don’t think I would’ve been the subject of such fawning nonsense if it weren’t for my background in philosophy.Seriously, I think my background in philosophy, as well as an inordinate amount of other liberal arts degrees and credits, have enabled me to look at things in, hopefully, a different way. At the very least, reading the really complicated philosophical works provide proof that, yes, there are far more difficult things to comprehend than really dumb client requests and demands.It has also, in rare moments of lucidity, allowed me to realize there are far more important things in this world than advertising: family, friends, art, Nietzsche, literature, oncologists and baked beans. While the baked beans bit may sound flippant, it isn’t; because when you come to grips with the fact that something as inconsequential as baked beans is more important than advertising, it allows you to create great advertising.Long Live philosophy and baked beans.NIKE.

How did Spike meet Mike?Bill Davenport and I were in L.A. editing one of those serious Nike spots and we saw Spike’s first movie, She’s Gotta Have It. In it Mars Blackmon finally gets to sleep with the woman of his dreams but won’t take off his Air Jordans to do it. Bingo on a silver platter.Furthermore, I think it showed Michael as a human, (fun) warts and all. Mars was everyman and every Jordan fan could relate to Michael through Mars. Well, at least that’s what we told ourselves. It also featured the athlete, for wont of a better term, as the product. I’ve always insisted an athlete, especially one of Michael’s stature, is more interesting than a shoe.I am a sports fan. I was a kid in a candy store who got paid to be in the candy store. Michael was the biggest candy store in the universe. Spike’s reaction was cool. Spike wasn’t Spike Lee yet. Spike answered his own phone when we called him about the project. Spike lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. Spike was a huge Jordan fan. What do you think Spike’s reaction was when we called him and asked him if he would like to direct and star in commercials with Michael Jordan and get paid for it?Spike and Mike may be the single luckiest thing that ever happened to me in my career.100% serendipity.Bill Davenport and I were in Los Angeles editing our first Jordan spot. It was pretty much standard fare for a Nike spot circa 1987: show the athlete being the athlete and have Pytka shoot it. Anyway, during some downtime we went and saw a fairly dreadful movie called About Last Night. The movie was a complete waste of celluloid, save for a trailer for some movie we never heard of called She’s Gotta Have It from some filmmaker we never heard of named Spike Lee.Long story short as possible: Davenport and I go see the movie in Portland. There’s a character in the movie named Mars Blackmon who so loves the man Air Jordan and the shoes Air Jordans, when he has the chance to sleep with the girl of his dreams he won’t remove his Jordans.Now that’s a fan. Now that’s a commercial.We called Spike the next day. Back then, he answered his phone. His only question was, “I get to direct the spots, right?” A few months of blah, blah, blahing and we were shooting the first round of Spike and Mike commercials.

I guess the spots worked for a number of reasons. It was the first time humor ever made its way into a Nike spot. But more importantly, I think it demystified and humanized Jordan. They were a counterpart to the Jordan we saw on sports reports every night, Jordan the total predator, the assassin who went out a couple nights a week and laid waste to enemy teams. Opposing teams got the killer, and the fans watching these spots got the charmer, the smile, a man of humor and intelligence, someone everyone seemed to like.Most important of all: It celebrated the fan and there was no bigger Jordan fan than Mars Blackmon.Executing the spots was easy; we took a page out of our Lou Reed spot. We wanted to make believe that Mars Blackmon, Air Jordan and Air Jordan’s number-one fan, was actually making these commercials and, yes, he knew they were commercials. We wanted to make the film look like Mars, not Spike, shot it. We wanted the music to sound like Mars wrote, produced and recorded it on some rinky-dink Casio in his Brooklyn apartment. We wanted the words to sound like Mars, not some aging white guy copywriter from Portland, wrote them.

Dave Kindred of The Sporting News once wrote, in something that made my parents awfully proud, “Mars Blackmon saved the NBA from extinction. His rescue of a drug-infested, money-poor, moribund league is a story so obvious it has been missed by analysts who credit Jordan Himself. Filmmaker and actor Spike Lee, working as Mars Blackmon and directing seven (sic) Nike commercials featuring Jordan, gave the NBA an identity at once positive, playful and powerful.”We shot Round Two the next year. We had to fight for Mars every year after the first year. Some people thought Mars got in the way of Jordan, but that’s like comparing a particle generator to a flower. It was worth fighting for Mars. Plus, I like fighting. Bo Knows.

Agassi.Charles Barkley.

Ice Hockey.ACG.

Dennis Leary.David Robinson.

Air Jordan.

Hare Jordan.

Retirement?Fake Jordan?

ALTA VISTA.

MICROSOFT.

NIKE.Lil' Penny.

Ken Griffey Jr. Tiger Woods.

'We're Ballers' MORE RIZ...Art.Book.Blogposts.Ephemera.