General
Jim Riswold, Creator of ‘Bo Knows’ and Air Jordan Ads, Dies at 66
His work for Nike — particularly commercials starring Michael Jordan and Spike Lee — blurred the line between advertising and entertainment.
Jim Riswold, a visionary and irreverent adman whose playful and occasionally provocative Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Bo Jackson redrew the playing field for product endorsements and propelled athletic footwear into the cultural stratosphere, died on Aug. 9 at his home in Portland, Ore. He was 66.
Mr. Riswold, who had fought various forms of cancer for two decades, announced his death on Instagram in a statement posted by his children that said, “Okay, I’m dead now.” His family said the cause was interstitial lung disease exacerbated by metastatic prostate cancer.
Described by colleagues and even competitors as an “idiot savant” and the Michael Jordan of advertising, Mr. Riswold was an exasperating man who occasionally credited himself — accurately, it turns out — with revolutionizing television commercials, turning them into a form of entertainment often more absorbing than the shows they interrupted.
“Jim had this incredible sense of how you can meld advertising and culture together and make it truthful and entertaining,” Susan Hoffman, his longtime colleague at Wieden+Kennedy, the global ad agency founded in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. “He was brilliant. You never wanted to tell him that, though.”
Mr. Riswold said that his success in advertising derived, in part, from his belief that advertising was trivial.
