Jay Chiat
Advertising legend
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Chiat was most recently chief exec of Internet startup ScreamingMedia, but he was best known for his work at the Los Angeles-based Chiat/Day agency, which he founded with copywriter Guy Day.
It was there he helped create quirky, popular ads for Nike , Energizer and perhaps most memorably Apple, which used the 1984 Super Bowl to launch its Macintosh computers with a groundbreaking commercial.
In the ad created by art director Lee Clow, written by Steve Hayden and directed by Ridley Scott, a young woman throws a sledgehammer through a giant video screen. Alluding to IBM, the then-monolithic force among personal computer manufacturers, the commercial promised that upon the arrival of the Macintosh, "you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984,' " alluding to George Orwell's dystopian novel.
Chiat's innovative office environments were as offbeat and perhaps as influential as his agency's ads. He was among the first to embrace an office-less office at Chiat/Day's Santa Monica headquarters, designed by Frank Gehry, where open cubicles predominated. In the 1980s, his new headquarters near Venice Beach, also designed by Gehry, featured a three-story set of binoculars that still elicits double takes from passers-by.
He additionally experimented briefly with a "virtual office," where telecommuting via phone and computer replaced many face-to-face meetings.
Nonetheless, he was also known as a tough boss. As one former employee put it, :They called it Chiat-Day and Night," a reference to the long hours staffers were expected to work.
Chiat was born in New York City, graduated from Rutgers in 1953 and moved to Southern California in 1956, where he began work as a copywriter at Leland Oliver Co. In 1962, he began the ad agency that merged with Day's in 1968.
Chiat sold Chiat/Day to Omnicom in 1995, where it is now the TBWA/Chiat/Day unit of TBWA Worldwide.
