Piece 3 of 13 · Persuasion · 2006–present · 2 min read

Twenty Years at Better World

Applied rhetoric, in a studio that only takes work worth doing

Better World Advertising was founded by Les Pappas in 1991 on a single rule: the work has to matter. HIV prevention. Vaccination outreach. Harm reduction. Public-health campaigns for audiences most advertising never speaks to. I arrived in September 2006.

Applied Rhetoric

Every campaign begins in the same question. Who is the audience, what do they already believe, and what figure is the design going to perform to move them? Ehses in the field. The logos, pathos, and ethos of the classroom deployed in the one domain where bad design carries measurable cost, a wrong font on a vaccination poster that loses a clinic a season of trust.

A San Francisco Muni train wrapped with the Our Sexual Revolution PrEP campaign, large display type and the line PrEP is a pill for people who are HIV negative, it protects you from HIV — Our Sexual Revolution, PrEP outreach, San Francisco Muni

The Range

Two decades produce a strange institutional library. Two hundred and twelve campaigns, one hundred and eighty-nine unique clients, sixteen issue areas. A shelf of HIV prevention briefs that reads as a history of an epidemic in the voice of the outreach that tried to end it.

State health departments. County public health authorities in Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, Cuyahoga. Community-based nonprofits whose annual budgets are smaller than the rounding error on a Super Bowl ad. Two federal clients, CDC and SAMHSA. The rest is civic infrastructure, barely visible until it disappears.

A press conference at a transit yard, a wrapped VTA bus behind the podium showing a young girl's face and the headline Un Condado Un Futuro, reporters with cameras in the foreground — Un Condado, Un Futuro, campaign press launch, Santa Clara County

The Long Middle

Year one is survival. Year two to five, the basic moves. The productive span is five through fifteen, the clients who call back, the briefs that quote a prior campaign, the institutional memory that does not need rebuilding every time. After fifteen, the work turns toward teaching the next person how to hold the room.

The Studio

An agency does not survive twenty years on technique alone. It survives on the people who stayed and the work they collectively refused to take.

The question before every first sketch is Ehses’s: what argument is this making, and is it worth making. The answer has to be yes, or the work does not proceed.

Persuasion · 2006 – present

“An agency does not survive twenty years on technique alone.”