Activity

To be clear, O’Hara’s aims were very different from Nike’s (or Wieden+Kennedy’s). O’Hara had little desire to reform the strategies of Madison Avenue or the fortunes of capitalism. Rather, he was eager to show how, through the poem, the commodity could be emptied of its content and made into a vess…

This becomes obvious once, in lines 3 through 6, the poem begins justifying its comparative claims through anaphoric “partly because” clauses

The postmodern advertisements of Wieden+Kennedy and their imitators introduce a commodity-without-qualities, a commodity whose power to segment markets and differentiate itself from competitors is not a design feature but a rhetorical—or dare I say, poetic—one. They do this by following their antec…