let the story lead activity
Part two of my No Gatekeeping interview with Ted Philipakos, the creative mind behind Venezia FC and Athens Kallithea.
Welcome back.
In case you missed Tuesday’s ‘sletter, it was all about Wright Thompson, writing, structure, and theme. I think Fredy Guarín got a mention in there, too, somewhere.
Today’s email is part two of a cracking No Gatekeeping with Ted Philipakos, ex-Chief Brand Officer at Venezia FC and current CD and President at Athens Kallithea. Part one was very warmly received, so I’m excited to share the rest.
I’ve done the spiel before — how Ted’s work shifted a paradigm, taking on clubs outside of the usual cultural scene and injecting them with high production values and an even higher level of taste, to great effect, etc — so let’s get into it.
As always, this interview is broadly about football culture but has loads of actionable learnings for creatives of any stroke. Knowledge of the game is a plus, not a necessity.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Sam
No Gatekeeping 002: Ted Philipakos (part two)
Okay, I wanted to start with something specific. Last week, AC Milan and LA-based brand Pleasures released a collaboration that seemed to typify a lot of what we were talking about. Business of Fashion led with the header: ‘The Football Team That Finally Got Fashion Right’. What did you think about it?
Well, let’s look at the lead quote: “When RedBird took over [AC Milan], we basically identified a strategy to play”—what was the phrase?—“at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and culture.” I mean first of all, I think the fact that the club’s Chief Commercial Officer is the one who's leading commentary on a brand collaboration and a kit release… That tells you everything you need to know.
What does it tell you?
You’re talking about one of the most important clubs in world football. There’s so much heritage and prestige. So when you’re talking about expressions of that club and that brand, I really do think that needs to be coming from a person who is a brand director or creative director, not a commercial director. But, you know, when you see the kit, it makes sense: to me, at least, the collaboration feels like a money-grab rather than a natural extension of who AC Milan are. I don't see how it serves the club's heritage, identity, culture, or anything like that. It’s just a commercial activity.
There’s also something about th—
I should also interrupt here to say: I don’t think it looks good. The campaign images are not good, the kit is not good. There’s not really a nice way to put it but, this was not a well-considered, well-executed project. Maybe I should stop myself there.
It doesn’t seem like there was a lot of thought behind it. The imagery: LA palm trees and moody shots of the Duomo. The kit supposedly references ‘hip-hop culture’, too? I have no idea how. There’s no story here. What’s the story it’s trying to tell about one of the most storied clubs in history?
They clearly did not begin with the story. You have to let the story lead activity. Here, a desire to do business spawned an activity which, at the end, needed a story tacked onto it. Look, Milan is such a big club with an amazing fanbase — the following is religious — so of course it’s going to sell to some degree. It will be a success from a short-term business perspective. But, for me, there’s no authenticity. Again, this feels obvious when it’s the commercial director giving quotes through — and I don’t have direct knowledge of this — what any reasonable person would believe to be a paid advertorial. There’s no other way to put it. It’s just marketing.
The thing that intrigued me most was the direct reference to RedBird [the New York-based hedge fund that invested in AC Milan] and how they, apparently, were the instigators in identifying this cultural intersection. They’re Milan. How can you claim to have not found culture already in Milan? It was so weirdly sycophantic but went entirely unchallenged.
I’m glad you said that. They’re really saying the quiet part out loud, there. They’re saying: A hedge fund was executing a business strategy. And they didn’t “identify” anything. This is a playbook that everyone knows now. One that, my work, unintentionally and regrettably, is partly responsible for influencing. But, wouldn’t it be more impactful if it wasn’t so literal? To not come out and say: We’re doing fashion now. It really does take the magic away when you do that, and you see it in football all the time now. There’s such a greater impact when you have the confidence to leave things to be understood. If you feel the need to explain it, it probably wasn’t that strong, and it becomes so nakedly transactional.
There is nothing more transactional than saying “Our hedge fund is identifying areas of culture for us to exploit and the shirt will now cost more money than usual.” I can see a way into this collaboration that would’ve made sense: a story about Italian-American identity, the heritage across generations, expanding the US fanbase, etc. But this really smacks of a designer sending over a design and then the club’s marketing team having to retrofit a story to that.
That’s exactly right. And I guess, who am I to judge? They’re a club with investment from a hedge fund, operating in an incredibly competitive environment, and they want to make money and compete at the elite level. But it’s not like merchandise like this is ever going to move the needle so dramatically. So, history, culture, and community should remain fundamental to any decision or activity. That’s especially the case if you’re a club as historic as Milan, but I don’t think that changes whether your club is big or small. I think, ultimately, it’s just disappointing. It’s the continuation of an awkward trend of big clubs trying to ‘out fashion’ each other. It feels beneath them. You’re AC Milan, don’t you know what that means? Who is Pleasures compared to you? And whatever a club like Milan is doing, it reverberates through the industry.
They have a responsibility.
And there’s no culture of critique left anymore to challenge it.
Yeah, this collab smacks of ‘Fuck it, we can do anything and nobody will say a word’.
Exactly. Look, as I say, any reasonable person would assume this was a paid advertorial and that's the modern reality of how campaigns are rolled out. It doesn't have to be Business of Fashion. Even within the football culture space — without calling out any one — it’s just the way it works now. Let's just say some of the most popular websites and Instagram accounts, they essentially just publish whatever they’re given. They’re basically kind of just rolling out press releases. Not much, if anything, changes. But what's absolutely certain is that critique is not there, unless I'm not finding the right things to read. I'd love to read them. Someone please show me the platform, where what's happening in football culture can be met with critique, where someone can say ‘this wasn't great for me, I don't really like the way this looks, I don't really like the concept behind this’ — that doesn't really exist anymore. I guess because it’s a bad business model, obviously.
I think it’s really interesting a point you made before about seeing football as a socio-political tool, and a club as a way of understanding a community and a culture. I see a lot of creative directors where their work seems to be about creating identical moodboards for each activation rather than working out a way to tell the best story. How do you see that balance between aesthetics and story?
Let me give you an example. A superficial view on Athens Kallithea FC could be that I’m just continuing my aesthetic take on Venezia, and someone might focus on the more traditional and minimalist take on design, or the analogue photography, or whatever, and they might try to take one of those pieces and run with it. First, this is a pure expression of my personal taste, because I have the freedom to decide on the alpha and omega, and, good or bad, it’s hard to fully replicate another person’s perspective. But, more importantly, what’s really happening, on closer look, is an expression of a mood that is manifested from my interpretation of the club and the city. There’s a little of ‘60s and ‘70s nostalgia — our club was founded in 1966, and I decided that would be a fun era to play with — mixed with modern attitudes in Athens. If you tried to take any pieces of the result, but your own origin story is something else, it wouldn’t make sense, at least not to people who are a bit discerning.
How do you begin identifying the elements you’ll pull together for a club project like Venezia or AKFC?
I'm operating based on my instincts. They’re instincts that come from living in a place and soaking it in. That's happening more naturally for me here in Athens because it's my city. That was part of my excitement in choosing to start a project here. But, in Venice, when I first went over, the first person I hired was my friend Sonya Kondratenko. For me, the beginning of defining or redefining the club’s historic brand was the two of us experiencing the city together. The early seeds of the new direction were: Let’s make this a love letter to the city of Venice. We were enamoured with the place, and what became the aesthetic and everything we created was just an expression of those feelings. It was an expression of experiencing that city.
Was there a tension between what you wanted to do and the core of fans who didn’t want anything to change?
To some extent, yeah. And that has to be managed, and it can be managed over time, but… Let me give you an example. This was at Venezia and I think this was the angriest I’ve ever been in football. We partnered with two universities in the city — a business school and an arts school — and carved out a section of the stadium for students. And it wasn’t much, it was 150 seats, something like that. And some of the art school kids… They looked a little different to other fans. They dressed differently, there were a lot of girls, some were gay men. And I don't want to paint with a broad brush and say everyone, but the fact that some of the ‘traditional fans’ had an animosity towards those kids entering a space that they felt they owned? I was really upset. I was like You motherfuckers. These kids live in your city. They drink coffee every day at the same spots you do. They go to the same bars you do, every single night. They’re part of your community. Nobody had the right to keep these kids out. When I saw that some fans had rejected them, I was furious.
And how do you manage with that?
You do it more! That’s the only way. You say, Let’s bring more of them. Now that I've left Venice, I don't think my work has been carried on very well since then, but at least when I look back, I can see some of that new audience is still at the stadium. That’s one of the few things I'm still happy about.
I’ve got a few questions from subscribers: There’s no clear roadmap into how to be a creative director working in football. What would be your advice?
The two most important things are, before you take any steps, understand why you're doing this. What is your source of inspiration and passion? If you're doing it because it's cool to work in football, don't go any further. And secondly, it's kind of related to the first point, but you have to trust what feels good to you. Without worrying about whether, or to what extent, other people are gonna like it. As long as you’re really true to the culture, if you can stay fiercely true to your feelings, your instincts, your tastes, you’ll be surprised with how that resonates with people. The moment you're trying to please anybody but you, you're on your way to making a mistake. Again, definitely easier said than done. But, to this day, however many years into this work I am, it's something that I try to remind myself of all the time. You have to come from an honest place, and be honest about your tastes.
Is that why your kits have been so successful?
If you really look at the Venezia kits, the Athens Kallithea FC kits, kits that have objectively been successful, right? They're very minimal. They're very traditional. I did not reinvent the wheel, really. The only thing I did was make things that felt good to me. And again, it goes back to my source of inspiration and my passion. My coming of age was in 90s football. It's the era I love, the aesthetics I love. And I make things that make that feel good to me, with collaborators with whom I’m on the same wavelength, and we’re rowing in the same direction. And when that’s presented well, I think it helps a design be more than just a design.
You’ve touched on it already, but when you’re first working on brand identity or brand personality for a project, what are the questions you ask yourself and the team around you?
It takes a lot of research into the question of who we are. It’s the history of the club and the nature of the community. The combination of those two things is the foundation. And then you want there to be an evolution. Otherwise you're stagnant. So the trick is harnessing the best elements of its existing nature and finding really measured ways to start expanding from there, rather than doing anything drastic. Because that’s just going to come off to people as marketing otherwise.
How do you describe that feeling, when it tips over into ‘marketing’?
When your focus is on converting people in a tangible way, rather than serving a mission or without any other higher purpose, that’s marketing. A mission is something where people will come along with you naturally. Like, if you asked me about the mission of Venezia FC, I have a very simple answer. I can drill down a lot from there, but it was simple: Venezia FC was meant to be an ambassador of the city of Venice, for people both in the city and outside the city. An inherently challenged and somewhat misunderstood city that really does need that representation. That was the mission, and everything else flows from there. There's a difference between that versus sponsored ads and targeted marketing. That stuff is viewing fans as a marketplace and trying to convert and sell to them.
How does that mission differ from Athens Kallithea FC?
I wanted to reposition football in Athens in a way that was going to give it back to people and create a more open and diverse community. The football environment, in too many places, can range from toxic to dangerous. And we wanted to carve out a space where it was different. That’s the local story. The second part is presenting our vision of Athens to the world. We're making small changes, pushing for the next bit of progress, the next bit of progress and the next bit of progress... But it's been painful. A labour of love but a painful one.
Just ace. Keep up the great work Sam.