Saturday September 15, 2007

The Profiler, Profiled

Back in April, I took the train up to Boston to write a profile of the ad agency Modernista! for Communication Arts. They handle advertising for Cadillac and Hummer, among other clients, and they also did the last good ads for MTV and The Gap. Lance Jensen, one of the shop’s co-founders, is also as responsible as anyone for making advertising music cool. He used Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” and Trio’s “Da Da Da” in VW spots years ago, and the rest is history. Since then, ads have replaced radio as the place for breaking new bands. Meanwhile, his partner, Gary Koepke, worked at Colors with Tibor Kalman and later became the creative director at Vibe. You can read the whole profile in the September/October issue of CA.

While I was there, web designer Geoff Lillemon dashed off the grotesque sketch of me pictured above. Although I admit that it displays some fidelity to my actual face, I comfort myself with the fact that Lillemon specializes in phantasmagoric imagery, as you can see from the agency’s homepage (which he designed) and his personal website.