Spike and Nike

Scene 5: So why are these Nike ads such a phenomenon? Part of it comes from Riswold's keen sense of cultural pitch and tone, which has helped give the ads their hip, glamorous aura. He first achieved renown in the ad world in 1984 for his stylish, evocative Honda scooter ads featuring such outlaw-hipster icons as Lou Reed, Sandra Bernhard, and Jim McMahon.

The Spike and Mike ads also show Riswold as something of a pop-culture seismograph. He and Bill Davenport, an executive producer at Wieden & Kennedy, approached Lee about doing a commercial immediately after seeing a trailer for She's Gotta Have It, in which Lee wore his Air Jordans. Lee's movie was just beginning to make ripples in the film world. By the time the first Spike and Mike ad aired in February 1988, Mars Blackmon already was recognized by aficionados of funky, off-the-beaten-track filmmaking — which, in turn, made Mars the perfect performer in an off-the-beaten-track ad campaign.

Hipness aside, however, the agency's Nike ads get their juice from sheer audacious cleverness, the kind that juxtaposes Bo Diddley's hard-driving sound with Bo Jackson's hard-driving athleticism, the kind that puts an ad in the middle of the first issue of The Nationalsports daily and calls it ''Halftime.''

''Look at how they're doing this ad without Michael, how they get around him not being here,'' Lee says. ''It's really turning a negative into a positive. They're smart enough to know how to pull that off.''

Riswold, a shy, diffident fellow with prematurely graying hair, is self-effacing when talking about his own work: ''There are too many people involved in these ads for me to take all the credit.'' But the holder of three college degrees (in communications, history, and philosophy) contends that it's the intelligence of the Nike campaign that communicates so strongly with its audience.

''Too much advertising,'' he says, ''is by the numbers, with research telling us to do this and research telling us to do that. It makes for formula advertising, and when you do that it leaves out any emotional ties with the consumer. (The Nike ads) don't talk down to the viewer. It's sharing a joke, sharing something inside with them. I'm not saying you have to be different for different's sake. But you don't have to go by the numbers all the time either. Because (if you do), you're just like everybody else.

''And then,'' he says, ''no one notices you.''

Do you know what he means? Do you know? Do you know?