I Didn’t Know Goodby Was A Harvard Man (But That Explains A Lot)

Business Week’s David Kiley recently interviewed Jeff Goodby. Here are some outtakes from their session:

Advertising has a responsibility to act like a thing that is going to be unavoidably in the environment, where we live and breathe. And we have a responsibility to make that work in such a way that it is welcomed and not scorned. Creating communication that is welcomed helps both the success of the advertising and the landscape. That’s where design comes in. Advertising is design in motion.

Well said, Mr. Goodby. I’ve always felt we have an immense responsibility to the customer, and that we rarely live up to it, because the client (not the customer) pays our salaries.

TV and the Net will soon be the same thing. And companies are going to acquire a reputation for either being good entertainers or not. And if you don’t play that game well, you’ll be left in the dust. Eventually, we’ll go to a Web site for all our entertainment. This is where advertising and design start to really look like the same thing. If you think of advertising as just selling, then that’s the old model.

I totally agree that brand sponsored content, not advertising, is the future. I do not agree that TV and the interweb are the same thing. TV is a passive medium. The interweb is an active medium, capable of accepting input, or programming, from countless directions.