Photo by Michael Rubenstein
John Jay, executive creative director,
Wieden+Kennedy
|
February 2007: In Character
Creating creative class
Where others see an ad agency, John Jay sees an incubator to
connect artists across time zones.
By Brian Libby
The Tokyo office of Portland advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy
occupies a perpendicular intersection, allowing an unobstructed
view down Gaen Higashi Street in the fashionable Roppongi
district, an ideal perch for watching this fast-paced city go
by.
But John C. Jay never stays perched anywhere for long:
He’s in his 50s but has the energy of a teenager.
“Welcome to Tokyo,” he says cheerfully to a visitor
in late October as he stands outside the office dressed in an
all-black designer outfit and shiny leather shoes, dropping
coins into a sidewalk vending machine. “I saw you coming
down the road. Would you like something to drink?”
Although now based in Portland after several years living in
Tokyo, each month Jay travels to W+K’s offices in Tokyo
and Shanghai, both of which he founded and oversees as partner
and executive creative director. The two offices have reported
growth of about 20% annually for the last several years. He
also travels regularly to the agency’s offices in London
and Amsterdam. “He’s become very good at sleeping
on planes,” says his wife, Janet Jay, a longtime fashion
industry veteran. “I don’t even think he really
gets jet lag anymore.”
He also has started with Janet a side project in Portland
called Studio J, a company devoted to everything from
developing building projects to hosting salons for out-of-town
artists and designers. Studio J occupies a massive second-floor
open space at Northwest Fifth and Couch, the epicenter of hip
Portland with three galleries, a vintage arcade and a Japanese
toy store all located there.
As if that and the frequent-flyer miles and side projects
weren’t enough, Jay also loves to go out, be it shopping,
concerts or gallery openings. “Everything we do has a
cultural context,” he says. “We have to be
connected to not just advertising and media and corporate
people but to the people making culture move. Far too often,
advertisers are observers in the culture, not participants. You
need to get your hands dirty and live it yourself.”
W+K’s Asian offices have acted as testing ground for
involving a broad array of creative talents at the agency:
filmmakers, musicians, painters. A focus at W+K has been new
media, particularly the Internet. Jay also founded the Tokyo
Lab, W+K’s own independent music and video label. In
Tokyo, many young people think of Wieden+Kennedy as music
producers and don’t even know they create advertising.
The purpose, Jay explains, is to act as a creative incubator.
“Business is changing rapidly,” he says.
“It’s because consumers are changing, especially
young people. You need to understand what inspires people
today, what’s relevant.”
“Normally people in his age group are suffering from not
knowing what’s going on today,” says Dan Wieden,
the agency’s co-founder. “But John is actually
ahead of most young folks.”
This is a time of transition for ad agencies everywhere. Gone
are the days where advertising is just slogans such as
“Plop-Plop, Fizz-Fizz” and “Where’s the
Beef?” Today companies such as W+K develop brand, a more
comprehensive and fluid sense of a company or product.
That’s something Jay grasps intuitively, and can be seen
in the company’s work for Nike, Diet Coke and ESPN.
“John has the ability to look at things more
holistically than through the traditional lens of
advertising,” Wieden says. “It’s a much more
emotional, aesthetic idea of brand. Evolving that way was just
a huge thing for us.”
The funny thing is, before joining Wieden+Kennedy, John Jay
had never even worked at an ad agency before.
Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, to Chinese immigrant
parents, Jay grew up in a small dwelling behind the
family’s laundry business without bedrooms or even a
living room. He had to clandestinely borrow a customer’s
outfit from the laundry to attend his high school prom.
Following college at Ohio State University, Jay headed to New
York City and began his career in graphic design, laying out
newspaper and magazine pages. His big break, though, came at
Bloomingdale’s, where as a creative director Jay helped
create the store’s iconic “Brown Bag.”
“They were constantly changing and they never had a name
on them, yet everyone in the city knew where they came
from,” he says. “It challenged every Harvard
business notion of branding.”
It’s that kind of thinking that made Dan Wieden offer
Jay a job 1993 (his second attempt after the two first met in
the late 1980s). “At that time, there was no such thing
as people from his background entering advertising,”
Wieden recalls. “But we were so struck by his
intelligence and charisma that we just thought, ‘We need
to work together.’”
During his years in Asia, W+K has been successful in wooing
Japanese corporations such as Sapporo beer in addition to the
agency’s stout domestic client list. But recently Jay has
come to wonder if amid all the globetrotting, he’s
neglected W+K’s flagship office in Portland. “We
have spent the last year on an intense recruitment, looking for
the most unusual talent in the world,” he explains.
“I want to be a part of that coming to
fruition.”
Jay also wants to get more involved in the city itself, which
he sees as a burgeoning cultural capital but one struggling
with how best to grow. He served as a curator for the Pacific
Northwest College of Art’s “Tokyo Flow”
symposium, is on Portland Center Stage’s board and is
looking to develop building projects through Studio J. “I
think what we must maintain is the outsider mentality,”
he says of Portland. “It’s key to the creative
energy here.”
He and Janet are set to begin hosting salons at Studio J this
year for visiting artists, designers and other creatives, as
they have in cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Studio J also is developing a housing project by renowned local
architect Brad Cloepfil, whom Jay first met as part of the team
that selected Cloepfil to design W+K’s internationally
acclaimed Pearl District headquarters.
“You can send him an e-mail from any time zone you
choose, and you’ll probably receive an answer within two
hours,” Wieden says. “He doesn’t want to let
one opportunity escape him. “
“I think I’m always searching for a way to be in
the center of the mix, wherever that may be,” Jay
reasons, “always thinking that there is something
exciting out there, interesting and dynamic people whom I
haven’t experienced yet.”
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