Yet he also says he's been consistently surprised about which clients are fun and satisfying to work for and which are not. Express has been smart and accommodating--a bit of a surprise considering that the brand is synonymous with mass shopping-mall retail. The people in Levi's marketing department were so plugged in they knew about the White Stripes before he did. On the other hand, his experience doing work for a Los Angeles alternative rock station is described with a round of profanity, and he found the neopunk band blink-182 to be clueless phonies. So he tries not to make assumptions.
Of course, the other thing that's not immediately obvious is why a corporation would want to work with Shepard Fairey.
The clients who have hired Studio Number One or BLK/MRKT often have in mind untraditional marketing campaigns built on word of mouth and reputation. So it makes sense that word of mouth and reputation come up so often as those clients explain how they connected with Fairey in the first place.
Justin McCormack, a marketing consultant, was promoting an extreme-sports event called the Gravity Games in 1999. "We were looking for someone who could help us reach this elusive youth market," he says. Young males, as he points out, are famously hard to target, watching little television and espousing a cynical attitude toward traditional media and advertising. At the time, McCormack says, he had no idea how to go after that demographic, so he started asking around. He heard about Fairey's firm, but the name didn't mean much to him--until he noticed a familiar image in the portfolio. An avid art fan, he had long been intrigued by the mysterious Obey imagery he'd seen in New York and other cities, and he'd wondered who was behind it. "I said, 'Holy smokes--it's you!"
Can you call someone a maverick if he works for giant corporations?
Fairey's firm promptly got the job of creating the Gravity Games' brand imagery and helping promote the event. "I don't know if I should say this, because it's illegal, but we hired [Fairey] to go out and poster downtown L.A. with our Gravity image," McCormack says. The event was a hit. More recently he hired the studio to create the logo for a new wireless scheme, called MobilRelay, that will offer users discounts on certain youth-oriented products and services from partner companies. "Studio Number One created a visual that's both corporate and cool, visually familiar and sexy. But it's not exclusionary to those who aren't that cool. They nailed it."
McCormack offers an interesting barometer for how to judge whether promotional imagery resonates with those elusive youths. "You have to give them something they really want," he says, so if a poster or a sticker looks so cool that kids are saving it and sticking it on a bulletin board, then it's a success. You can't stick a website on a bulletin board, but the home page for MobilRelay (which is slated to go live in a few months) has a rough, paint-splattered, organic feel; at the same time, it's not so wild-looking that it's hard to read. Anyone who's interested can navigate it. That's the sweet spot that a lot of marketers are looking for, but it's hard to achieve. In Fairey's view, this is largely a matter of instinct--like Louis Armstrong's famous response when asked to define jazz: "If you have to ask, you'll never know." He's able to connect with this demographic because he shares its mindset; he's not an outsider trying to find his way through a subculture, but rather a product of that subculture--one who still participates in it. "I can't really put my finger on why other people don't seem to be able to do stuff that just for me is very logical," he says. "It's hard to deconstruct when you're so close to it."
Robert Douglas, who is director of lifestyle marketing for the Brand Buzz unit of mega ad agency Young & Rubicam, tracked down Fairey several years ago after seeing his street art. He used BLK/MRKT for multiple projects, including producing graphics for a youth-oriented 7 UP spinoff called dnL. When Dr Pepper/Seven Up, the Plano, Texas-based beverage giant, tapped his firm to work on the relaunch of Sunkist, Douglas quickly called Studio Number One. The project is a good example of how the process works.
In early October, Douglas sent over an explanation of the planned Sunkist promotion. Called "Charged Experiences," it involves a contest that will allow various winners to, for instance, hang out with pro athletes or get onto the set of a blockbuster movie. It's scheduled to roll out this summer and will be supported by print and television ads. The target: "multicultural urban teens and influencers" age 13 to 18. (This will be, of course, a departure from the traditional Sunkist beach vibe.) The assignment: treatments of a "Sunkist Charged Experiences" logo, including one with a "graffiti look."
Often, Fairey points out, client directives can be vague, boiling down to something along the lines of: Make it look cool. "They'll say they're going for a little bit more of an urban feel, so we ask, 'Urban like hip-hop, like black? Or urban like disaffected suburban white graffiti kids?' And they get a little bit more specific: 'Well, we don't want it to be too graffiti, because we can't promote graffiti, but we definitely want it to be a little edgier.' So we take that and translate it to, like, a city skyline, the sort of generic cool urban symbol. And we throw a few concepts together."
