The Outlaw is always In

(Story of a RebelMark’s Calling to Publicidad)

“To live outside the law, you must be honest” said Dylan. Well the South African army had called me up to fight the “Commies” and the Cubans in Angola’s civil war. That was when my gut told me that it was better to live outside the law, than to live inside it, fighting another man’s war, in another country, for a cause I knew nothing about — and cared even less. That was when I crossed the line into “Outlaw” and so begins the story of the “RebelMark” that lives inside of me.

With 800 rand in my pocket I bolted to a place where I could mark time without spending a dime, a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee (where Jesus walked on water). No place on earth is as addictive as Israel and after just three months, I was hooked. Then I got a letter from my boet,Graham Rothschild, telling me about the incredible “jol” that he was having on the Spanish island of Ibiza. (Think hippie and hedonist capital of the world for Franco had just died and the youth were going crazy breathing new life into “que viva Espana”). Weeks later (but not before I had visited Jerusalem) I was hitch hiking across the Med to Barcelona to catch a ferry to Ibiza.

Then through a “simple twist of fate” I connected with Antonio Eschotado and Manuel Saenz de Heredia, two thirty something “drop outs”, the one from being a professor at the University of Madrid, the other from being Spain’s youngest diplomat. Anyway when I landed on the island in the summer of ‘76 they were launching their new dream: a great live music joint called “Amnesia”. (Great name for a night club, hey?) Rebelmark or not, I was a super hard worker — at least relative to the other hired help lolling lazily around all day in sluggish, stoned state. So I landed up behind the bar on opening night…and that’s when the best years of my life rolled out…More to the point, that’s when my calling to “publicidad” began.

Getting people to come to Amnesia and especially to our fiestas became my big preoccupation. Mostly I copied what Pacha did, coming up with themes that had to do with the moon, sun, waters and enchanting maidens of this aura filled magical place. Theme picked, party named (yes that’s when I first learned that the most important marketing decision is the name), we’d then design a poster, make T shirts and unleash the pulling power of beautifully bronzed “gupas” (girls) to hand-out leaflets around the old town and port lined with bars where the in crowd hung.

RebelMarks are “fire” brands ruled by the Outlaw archetype. They burn high and hot and are fed by the heavy fuel that transforms the flame into an explosion of intense ferocity. All too often they are ravaged by the very fuel that feeds them and are thus prematurely extinguished. But their spirits live on…Take Jimi Hendrix who shocked his audience by burning his Fender Stratocaster on stage and smashing it into bits and pieces like he did to his own body. Only Jimi could make it sing like a “Machine Gun” to protest Vietnam or turn the “Star Spangled Banner” on its head only to go gently into that good night with the help of too many sleeping pills. “Judge not” said Bob Marley, that RebelMark who exhorted us to “get up, stand up” in that great album aptly named “Burnin’”. I nearly touched Marley, on a hot August night in ‘78 at the bull ring in Ibiza where we all fell, spellbound to “Jah love” and his “songs of freedom”.

Outlaws are rebels with a cause. Like all Archetypes, the Outlaw has a light side and a “shadow” as Jung called it. Take Che Guerara for example. His light side shines through in his poster portrait that is probably the most famous symbol of all that is great and seductive and cool about 20th century anti-heroes. The light side of Che’s story is told in “Motorcycle Diaries”. The “shadow”, as Carl Jung called it, is the story of Che presiding over hundreds of executions as “Supreme Prosecutor” in Castro’s newly liberated Cuba.

The all American RebelMark, made by Hollywood, is of course James Dean. True to type he died young but left an indelible mark on our collective imagination through “East of Eden” and “Rebel without a cause” and beyond all that his iconic image. His is the archetypal story of Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid, Jesse James and the one that Dylan sang about, John Wesley Hardin’. Word has it that Hardin’ couldn’t get to sleep one night because of the noise next door so rather than get up he thought he’d just shoot and worry about it in the morning. One bullet unfortunately flew too straight and killed his noisy next door neighbour. If it had been in another hotel, John Wesley I’m sure would have gone peacefully to sleep but it was in Wild Bill Hickok’s jurisdiction. And so begins the archetypal chase…Hardin’ is eventually caught wounded in a gambling dispute and is sentenced to 17 long years in goal; only to be eventually freed and then later randomly shot in the back three times as he sat brooding in the bar with his whores.

The light side of the Outlaw archetype can be traced back to the myths of legends like Robin Hood: “King of outlaws, prince of good fellows”. This English folk tale was passed down by word of mouth from the thirteenth century. It’s the story of a nobleman who is unjustly deprived of his land. As a result Robin robs the rich to feed the poor with his Merry Men who out-fox the wealthy establishment. This is the story of the Outlaw as champion of the people. The same story of the RebelMark underdog, yes that brand whose logo is a bitten apple. (Ever wondered why Jobs went with that logo for Apple? Bet he was inspired by the original outlaw Eve to do “disobedient” business!)

The Outlaw archetype is so addictive because it talks to our reptilian brains and we simply cannot say no to the calling of those urgent, primal, (nearly always) sexual forces, Freud called the libido. So where there’s the Outlaw there is sure to be sex and drugs and rock n roll because as Ian Dury sang “it’s all my brain and body needs”. Rolling down this road is a brand called the Hell’s Angels colliding with the very air they breathe for they represent the “shadow” Outlaw. The light side was glamorized by films like Easy Rider and of course the iconic Harley Davidson. And where there are Harleys and Hells Angels, there’s sure to be Levi’s. (Back in the day Levi’s ran the best ads. Like the one with the James Dean lookalike at the launderette who strips down to wash his Levi’s to the sound of “I heard it through the grapevine”).

Let me conclude this RebelMark story with a short tale of a potato chip. Well the mission was to reposition Ruffles as the young adult snack brand. At the time, Ruffles was a rather tired Pepsico brand, back in the Roberto Enrico era during which Alan Potash and BBDO’s Phil Dusenberry were running one of the most memorable RebelMark campaigns of the 20th century building next generation Pepsi and having a lot of fun making Coca Cola look old fashioned and uncool.

“One great insight is worth a thousand good ideas”.

Said the great Phil Dusenberry. Anyway on that day of reckoning trying to crack a new code for Ruffles, we were all locked away in a penthouse overlooking Miami Beach and armed with documents galore and ad reels everywhere. We couldn’t have known more about the consumer or how to talk to him. We just couldn’t get that proverbial “great insight”. Then somebody started to talk about the “onda” or wave in the ridged chip and about how it trapped more flavour… when I suddenly flashed on my youngest sister Valerie who happened to be having her 18th birthday back home. “Wish I was 18, I thought, being in love one day, heartbroken the next. Then it hit me: life is much better, so much more flavourful when it is full of ups and downs.

Eureka! In that instant I saw Ruffles, the ridged chip that I was about to stuff into my face, in a whole new flavorful light and I wrote down the line:

“The unflat chip because your life is not flat”.

What teenager or young adult wants to “flat line”? That’s boring! Who wants to ride the waves of life, swallowing intensely flavourful ups and downs? That’s living. And that dear reader was the first time I truly appreciated what Leo Burnet said when he urged us to unleash the “inherent drama of the product”. (To be continued)