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Jon Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum strive not to be seen. They hide in the Pen & Pencil Restaurant, an upscale restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.

It is lunch break and the waiter, dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, has come to take her order once or twice, but again they push him away. The two ad hustlers work for different advertising agencies, but have a side appearance where they can meet during lunch break to work on freelance projects.

The projects pay just enough to buy the duo lunch in the city's most expensive restaurants.

You only have lunch break to come up with an idea for a full-page print ad for Kenneth Cole shoes. There is no agreement to place an ad. This means that Kenneth Cole himself must feel that the ad is good enough to spend the money.

It's 1986. Ronald Reagan is President of the United States. Madonna sings "Papa Don & # 39; t Preach", Cyndi Lauder has her hit "True Colors". The film "Top Gun" with Tom Cruise has not yet been released, but the unusual Australian Roma com "Crocodile Dundee" is shown on film screens.

In the Philippines, dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda hit the headlines as a jet-setting bootstrapper. Their country is besieged by enormous poverty, but the couple plays in the international party circle. Short news: A newspaper article shows that the buyer Imelda Marcos has thousands of pairs of shoes.

A few days later, advertising creative director James Patterson walks through the sad hallways of legendary advertising agency J. Walter (the same James Patterson later becomes the famous author James Patterson). In the 21st century, JWT became one of the models for the TV show "Madmen", but in 1986 the agency stank of mold.

Patterson enters every office in the JWT creative department and holds up a page in the New York Times before scaring art directors and copywriters.

It is a full page advertisement for Kenneth Cole shoes. The advertisement consists of two simple sentences in black and white. No photo. No picture of shoes. In execution, this is the most cost-effective advertising you can produce in the New York Times. In fact, the only thing that would be cheaper than this ad would be to serve a blank page. And the ad is a simple one-liner.

“Imelda Marcos bought 2,700 pairs of shoes. You could at least have had the courtesy to buy a pair of us. – Kenneth Cole. "

"This is the kind of work we should be doing here!" Explains Patterson, then stomps down the hall to the next office and then to the next. It is a long hallway. "Why can't we work like this here?" "Why don't you run ads like this?"

Finally Patterson reaches the copywriter Richard Kirshenbaum's office and leans forward. "Why can't you do this kind of work?" he roars.

Kirshenbaum looks at the display, then at Patterson and laughs. "There is no way we can do this kind of work here," Kirshenbaum replies. “This place is shit. Kenneth Cole is my freelance customer! "

This is the beginning of the legendary advertising agency Kirshenbaum + Bond. K + B (which later became KBS) is almost forgotten and has set fire to many of the topics, explanations and ways of thinking that are still used today in social, digital and traditional advertising and marketing.

The first pop-up store.

Use real people instead of actors in television advertising.

The real video look of "Reality TV".

Brilliant ideas that are so fun, meaningful and affordable that customers can't resist buying them. And people couldn't help but talk about them.

Kirshenbaum + Bond did not advertise Word Of Mouth (WOM) as a by-product, but as a deliberate result. Twenty years before the Twitter stream.

Kirshenbaum + Bond's Kenneth Cole print campaign became a New York affair. In the 1990s, everyone in Manhattan, both consumers and industry representatives, watched and waited for the next ad.

"There was no media plan," Jon Bond recalls. "We were waiting for events to get Kenneth's opinion."

Kenneth Cole ads were full of word games, double intentions, and a wink for the Manhattan tribe. They were culturally relevant, deliberately causal, outrageous less about footwear than about the values ​​of the people who wanted to wear Kenneth Cole shoes.

It is important that Kenneth Cole's advertising gave voice to modern topics: AIDS, homelessness, political friction. When Lorena Bobbit cut off her husband's penis, there was an indication of it. When Vice President Dan Quayle publicly embarrassed himself by spelling a word incorrectly, there was an advertisement for it. When conservatives ignored the AIDS epidemic, Kenneth Cole ads courageously supported research and funding.

This is important at a time before K + B's Kenneth Cole ads, which have been used specifically, are paying special attention. The ads were funny, cute, gaudy, smart, and full-page news in America's most culturally diverse and actionable city. Kenneth Cole ads served as activist calls to advance social issues.

The DNA for Nike's Kaepernick advertising lies with Kenneth Cole. "Kenneth Cole was definitely at the forefront of purpose marketing," nods Bill Oberlander, who was art director on the Kenneth Cole account.

Big and small businesses pointed to Kenneth Cole ads as the thing. "We founded the agency with this one client," says Jon Bond.

Fast forward

Colleen Broomall was in sixth grade when her mother told her she didn't want to take her to take your daughter to work. Ms. Barbara Broomall was at an alternative high school teacher in New Jersey, where she taught emotionally disturbed students. She didn't want daughter Colleen to get involved in the complexity of her students.

"I was 12 years old," Colleen recalls. "I am a feminist and when my mother said" No "I asked the Snapple Lady if I could go to work with her."

The "Snapple Lady" was Wendy Kaufman, a Snapple employee who Kirshenbaum + Bond had written in television advertising.

Snapple management had seen the Kenneth Cole campaign and wanted Kirshenbaum + Bond to do something just as smart, fun and breakthrough for them. At that time, the brewed tea company Snapple was a regional family business – an outlier in a beverage industry dominated by Coke and Pepsi.

The company advertised Snapple on local NBC radio shows with Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh (themselves young brands). But when these celebrities mentioned Snapple in the air, many in their audience didn't know who or what "Snapple" was.

"Before these commercials aired, it was just a spunky little beverage company," says Broomall. "People would write to Snapple, but no one would answer the letters. Wendy has named herself a PR lady and started answering letters. "

“I worked with the truck drivers who were working on orders,” explains Wendy Kaufman, probably the first “real” person to be seen on television screens (the so-called “Reality T.V.” only appeared in another decade). "I committed myself to public relations because I could relate to the public."

On the morning of Take Your Daughter To Work Day, a black limousine with six boxes of snapple stopped outside Colleen Broomall's house in New Jersey. Likewise, Colleen spent her day helping Wendy visit people's homes, and beautify their days with free snapple.

"People got involved with me because I was 100 percent natural advertising," recalls Wendy. This was in the middle of the Coke Wars when rivals Coke and Pepsi showed off supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Christy Brinkley.

"I was overweight, I had weaknesses. I wasn't beautiful, ”says Kaufman. "I wasn't perfect and I wasn't listening. It was a radical step for them to hire me. And it paid off – the fans loved me.

"K + B had the wonderful opportunity to expand its brand as we built our brand," continues Wendy, who is currently quarantined in western Massachusetts. “We were these crazy people who ended up in the mainstream. We were the outsiders, the outsiders. We made people happy. We built together. We were like a big family. "

"Wendy brought so much kindness and joy because of her spirit," says Colleen Broomall. "And I wanted to be like her."

"The kindness we've done for other people," recalls Kaufman. "If people didn't have money, we gave them snapple. It was a life change for people."

"The idea behind Snapple was that trust is more important than being" perfect, "says Jon Bond. "There were no scripts. Everything was real. A dog went into the frame, we kept it. We were honest. "

(Snapple is one of the great success stories in advertising. It's also the saddest. Snapple was a $ 23 million company when they hired K + B and a $ 750 million company three years later. As Snapple Quaker Oats sold, they immediately threw it off Wendy's campaign.)

There are other stories

Hennessy cognac sales declined because people didn't drink after dinner. K + B visited their local bar across the street to experiment. They found that cooling the cognac and adding a drop of lemon made the product easier and better for pre-dinner cocktails. Then they poured it into a martini glass because it is cooler (although "martini" was defined as a drink with wormwood and vodka or gin at that time). But what happened next was inspiring.

"We hired dozens of actors in key cities to break into bars that didn't serve Hennessy," Jon Bond recalls. “We staged mini-dramas in the bar – usually when the attractive couple got into a fight and then put together and ordered Hennessy for everyone. Nobody knew it would be staged until an Esquire article came out years later. "

Meanwhile, Hennessy's sales increased from 400,000 to 2.5 million cases. Hennessy was named Spirits Marketer of the Year twice.

Nowadays, pop-up stores are an ever-present part of retail, but until K + B christened it by creating snap retail space for Delta, "The Apprentice" and temporary retail space for Target on the ships of the Hudson River, the pop-up, The concept was an outlier idea that didn't really exist. (K + B also helped turn Target from price buyer to design chic.)

In 1992, the legendary rock music group The Rolling Stones wanted to launch a clothing brand called Rockwear. (Polo shirts that looked very similar to Ralph Lauren – except that The Stones' iconic tongue logo would replace the polo pony.) The perfect middle finger for the fashion designer's orthodoxy.

Kirshenbaum + Bond presented Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger with an advertising campaign during his Steel Wheels tour. They met at the Ritz Carlton Bar in Naples.

Mick had attended the London School of Economics and was therefore often a brand manager for the Rolling Stones franchise than the singer of the band.

Jon Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum showed Mick a magazine advertisement that contained a photo of the band members on the stage without clothes (musical instruments were strategically placed).

Jagger stared at the photo. And stared more.

Finally Mick looked up and said, "Well. That's fine with me because I keep myself pretty fit. But did you take a close look at the other guys? "

It is indescribably difficult to describe how disrespectful, shocking, funny, outrageous and encouraging K + B's work was in the tonality of the 1990s in America. The world was flat. Not even "Saturday Night Live" was particularly funny. This was a time before sex in the White House. Terrorists hijacked planes, not cities or countries. Anyone could call the Beatles.

Commerce played in the media amphitheater of the 1990s and needed hard dollars to be seen or heard. Startups existed but only after they received millions of dollars in funding. The advertising was aimed at an ideal consumer who was ready for prime time, not for the big sloppy proletariat.

Adjectives that were reserved for greeting cards were emotional, personal or social. All other advertisers are prepared for polished frontal attacks.

In contrast, the Kenneth Cole campaign was not only an efficient use of the media, but also became a megaphone for social issues, current events, human rights, values ​​and social justice. Transparency? You could see through it. Their value proposition in trendy New York City did not come from shoes, but from the people who wore them. (To answer the question of whether purpose-built brands are successful or not: Kenneth Cole rose from $ 2 million to over $ 500 million over the course of the campaign.)

Across the city, the Donny Deutsch supplies did similar things (example: a real person to make IKEA's entry into Long Island easier), but they didn't come from the same provocative spine tap.

Kirshenbaum + Bond had an unfair advantage because the agency was driven by its culture.

The agency's culture was overt acceptance – when they were gay, the strange person in high school, the person who didn't fit – they felt for the first time in their lives that they fit. K + B was a place for outcasts. At the agency's 10th anniversary, the receptionist, a huge black gay man, lay down on Jon and Richard's lap and sang "Mister President".

A new, disruptive agency

Traditional, conservative advertising agencies viewed K + B as an insult, a spit on the face.

"At K + B, the culture was" winning the best ideas, "" summarizes Rosemarie Ryan, former President of K + B. "There was no" we can't ". It was a meritocracy. People didn't care about titles, we didn't care about the work we do. I was 31 when I became president. People were very young and were interested in culture. "

These days, Joe Doucet is head of his own design company JDXP and listed in Fast Company as one of the best industrial designers of the century. As a partner and head of the design group at Kirshenbaum + Bond, however, he had a head start. Doucet remembers the intensity, the desire to do great work, the closeness of the people who worked there. "We were the outsiders who competed against much larger agencies," he recalls. "We were very small, very agile."

"We didn't think about advertising in traditional terms of the 30-second TV commercial – although we did a lot of it," recalls Rosemarie Ryan. "When I started, we were three people and our customers didn't have big budgets, so we had to learn to get the most out of what we had, which forced us to think more creatively about how we got into the market.

“PR was fundamental. We were integrated, word of mouth, experiences (chalk on the sidewalk) that contributed to the other work we were doing. Strategically placed media that could arouse great interest. We were way ahead of it – that made us successful. It was a very modern way of thinking about the launch. "

"At the time, we were very independent of the media – we didn't think of (the formula) print advertising, TV spot," agrees Bill Oberlander, who is now the founder and executive creative director of his agency Oberland. “For Snapple, the job was, in my opinion, a B2B ad, and we wondered how we could connect with the audience. Period. That was the idea for Snapple Stickers – we put stickers for mango-flavored snapple on mangoes in the supermarket (and also on apples and other snapple fruits).

"For Bambu lingerie we put" stickers "on the sidewalk:" From here you apparently need a new pair of underwear. "We used watercolor paints so we wouldn't have any problems with the city.

"How do we touch the consumer on an emotional level – and do we just imitate it as we go?"

Even the stories have stories

Everything you need to know to explain Jon Bond can be summed up in one sentence: his mother was a psychoanalyst and his father was a film and theater star. After attending Washington University in St. Louis, Jon returned to New York City and took a job as a messenger. He dropped off parcels at fancy advertising agencies and discovered David Ogilvy's "Confessions of an Advertising Professional" during a delivery. He was thrilled and decided to become a copywriter. He put together a portfolio. He worked for Trout & Ries, the team that developed the concept of “positioning” in the 1970s (a ubiquitous marketing term since then). Then he met Richard Kirshenbaum.

Shortly after James Patterson placed Kenneth Cole Imelda Marcos' ad in front of Richard Kirshenbaum, Jon Bond met Bill Tragos, one of the founders of TBWA advertising agency, at a party in Greenwich, Connecticut. Jon Bond asked Bill Tragos if he should start an advertising agency. "Do it," said Tragos. "You will make a lot of money."

Where are you now?

Graduates from K + B have entered the universe and become directors, photographers, designers and builders of their own agencies.

Jane Geraghty is in London and runs Landor. Strategist Domenico Vitale helped create People Ideas + Culture, a new type of creative company. Account manager Felicia Stingone helped rename 92nd Street Y to 92Y and then worked with legendary New York restaurant owner Danny Meyer. Creative Mike McGuire became a dynamite film director. Rosemarie Ryan started a co-collective. Jon Bond is still in Manhattan and is still a serial entrepreneur with companies like Media Kitchen, Big Fuel, Lime, The Shipyard and others.

"Jon Bond is basically the guerrilla marketing pioneer," said Geoff Colon, director of Microsoft Advertising's Brand Studio. Colon reminds us from Seattle that human behavior regarding data points and mapping has been simplified. Intuitive judgment is unlimited. "Jon was a pioneer in what we now consider disruptive or guerrilla marketing, even though he just thought: that's how people behave – let's use that somehow."

"People in the technology world don't think that matters anymore," Colon says. “We take the things we do today for granted. We forget that it was originally original thoughts. "

Which is probably the best way to remember Kirsenbaum + Bond.

Contribution to the Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding

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