People

Heart and Sole: Kenneth Cole

Shoe czar Kenneth Cole — the fashion world’s
No. 1 cause provocateur — shoots from the lip on
AIDS to global warming and the Iraq War.
What’s next?
Kenneth Cole has always been a master of the message. In 1982, after spending all his money making shoes in Europe, the designer returned to his native New York with no money left to open a store of his own. Broke and in need of fast cash, Cole borrowed a 40-foot trailer and got permission to park it in Midtown by applying for a film permit and changing the name of his company to Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc.; he called his feigned film “The Birth of a Shoe Company.” It worked. Parked across from the New York Hilton and armed with klieg lights and a movie camera, Cole and his business got rolling, big-time, selling some 40,000 pairs of shoes in just two-and-one-half days. Twenty-five years later, Cole’s company, now a $500 million fashion empire, retains its name as a production company, and the showbiz shoe still fits: Cole’s arresting social advocacy campaigns have also become the stuff of legend, raising awareness not only for his brands but for the causes closest to his heart. Today, the 53-year-old Cole chairs The Foundation for AIDS Research, the organization he helped to cofound in 1985 with a now-famous ad that contributed to shattering the silence about the virus, both in New York and nationally.

CONTRIBUTE Editor-in-Chief Marcia Stepanek caught up with Cole recently to talk about his penchant for agit-pop and his evolution into one of the nation’s leading cause advocates in business today. An edited version of that interview follows. Some say you were born with a message in your mouth. That’s not far from the truth, is it?

My maternal grandfather was a role model for me in that regard. He was a dentist, but as long back as I can remember, he was coming up with these slogans and using them on people. He’d say things like, “You are what you eat,’’ — you know, the kind of thing that everyone else would be saying 40 years later. He could be very outspoken, sometimes to the point of being a public menace. [laughter] One of his favorites was about smoking. He’d say, “Second- hand smoke is as bad for you as if you smoked yourself.’’

I remember when I was in elementary school, I was in an elevator with him and somebody was smoking a cigarette and he asked them politely to put it out. And when they wouldn’t, he went up to them and grabbed the cigarette right out of their mouth. He was ahead of his time. He believed in certain public health and certain social issues and he acted on them. And your father?

He was very definitive on his political points of view. My dad’s family was very conservative, very Republican. He was an ex-Marine. You grew up in interesting times — the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. Were there arguments over the family dinner table?

Yes, to a degree. I was probably the most passionate among my siblings. I was always kind of looking for a voice, and I’ve always kind of struggled over how to find a way not to get lost in a crowd. So over the years, I have found opportunities to talk about social and human issues.

I prefer not to refer to them as political issues because they tend to be discounted when they’re assumed to be political. And I have tried to find a platform at a time when it’s empty, when it’s quiet, with the notion that you can scream in a crowded room and no one can hear you if it’s noisy, whereas you can whisper in an empty auditorium and your words are heard.

When I did my first AIDS awareness ad in 1985, it was as quiet as it could be. The public dialogue was nonexistent. It was inappropriate to talk about AIDS in 1985. [President Ronald] Reagan wouldn’t speak about it until 1987, after 40,000 people had already died.

“Our [advocacy] ads aim to make the curious think — to start a dialogue and shake things up a little,” says Cole. Cole’s HAVE A HEART, GIVE A SOLE campaign in 1988 attempted to raise awareness of homelessness at the end of one of the country’s greatest periods of economic affluence. So why did you? What was the motivation to be first?

That I could. I recognized an opportunity to say something important when nobody else was saying it. Back then, in 1985, there was this pervasive social consciousness around world hunger. There was Live Aid, World Aid, Hands Across America, We Are The World, and many more — and most of it was about hunger in Ethiopia. But Ethiopia seemed very removed from our lives. Maybe, I thought, there was something relevant to all of our lives hitting much closer to home. If we could speak out about that, I thought, it would be extraordinary. And there was an issue like that — AIDS. It was clearly an issue at that time in need of a voice. The stigma was so massive and significant. More people were prepared to live with HIV/AIDS than find out if they had it and deal with the consequences of people knowing they had it. And that hasn’t changed a whole lot. So how did that first ad come together?

I enlisted Annie Liebovitz, the photographer; we identified the role models in our industry, and I also enlisted the support of a new AIDS organization just being formed back then, called am- FAR. (I’m now chairman of that organization.) I also turned to an advertising friend from my El Greco/Candie’s days, Grace Safe, and another friend, Faith Kates, and then a model agent at Wilhelmina (now CEO of the Next Modeling Agency) also jumped in and we began making calls: Christie Brinkley was then eight months pregnant and hadn’t been photographed publicly in six months; Paulina Porizkova, who was on Seventeen magazine covers at the time; Julianne Phillips, who had just married Bruce Springsteen, and Kelly Emberg, who had just had a daughter, Ruby, with Rod Stewart.

We brought them all together into a studio in Manhattan, and added the children. I believed their faces, especially, could potentially do more to de-stigmatize the disease than any amount of celebrity support. But I also wanted to avoid any chance the ad could be seen as exploitive. I knew we couldn’t have our shoes in the photo, but if the models were not going to wear our shoes, clearly we couldn’t let them wear anyone else’s, so everyone went barefoot. Twenty-three magazines offered to run the ad for nothing. Ironically, the only person who did not cooperate was Andy Warhol. He ran Interview magazine, and when I asked him to run that first AIDS ad, he told me, “If I started doing ads like that, I’d have to start giving space to the ASPCA and people like that.” Cole’s first ad to raise awareness of AIDS in America sought to shatter the public silence about the threat and spread of the virus. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the ad ran gratis from March- December 1986 in 23 magazines across the country. Models went shoeless: Cole says he didn’t want to be accused of exploiting the issue. What was the general reaction to that first AIDS ad?

It was controversial but I was prepared for that. I thought, people are going to have a problem with this; they’re going to question its appropriateness. They’re going to question its rationale. They may even question the message. They may even, to a greater degree, question the messenger. But I don’t think there was really, at the end of the day, any downside. You’ve said that politicians and fashion designers are, in some ways, alike.

Both the designer and the politician have to establish a relationship with their constituents. Both are vulnerable to shifting opinion. Indeed, a lot of your ads over the years have riffed off the news: the stock market crash in 1987 — “With all the people who’ve lost their shirts, it’s a shame we’re in the shoe business” — and another, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1992, saying, “Now there’s nothing to keep anyone from coming to our Semi- Annual Sale;” and the post-9/11 ads saying, “What you stand for is more important than what you stand in.” Others have been about issues: poverty, gun control, fair wages. You recently had a billboard up on the West Side Highway in Manhattan about global warming — “Is it me or is it warm in here?”

I think in my business — and it’s probably not much different than the business of politics — is that you have to be relevant. It’s very much about what the message is, and how you present it, and when, and where. If you have the right message in the wrong place, it doesn’t resonate. So it’s crucial to communicate and to connect.

I try to find relevance in everything I do. How do I both serve the business and serve my need to be involved in community interests that are very important to me? Fashion is wonderful that way. Is fashion important? Is it trivial? Is it frivolous? Or, can it, in fact, be meaningful? I’ve always sought ways to try to make it part of something bigger than it was. We can say to people, “It’s not just what you look like on the outside, it’s who you are on the inside. ” If we can do that, we can create a far more substantive and meaningful relationship with them — one that doesn’t change every few months and it doesn’t change with fashion whims. Brand loyalty.

Corporations, as well as individuals, are going to realize that they need to connect themselves to their communities. I mean, there’s a whole new dynamic. Years ago, government was founded on the principal of caring for those less able to take care of themselves. But today it really isn’t that. I think Corporate America is realizing that failing to take care of the community will impact a business’ ability to exist comfortably. I think all businesses will get there. Either their hearts will get them there or their balance sheets will get them there. Hopefully it’ll be the former. In your mind, which have been your most provocative ads?

I’ve always waited for opportunities to say something that I felt was important, and then if I had something to say, I’d say it. Over time, I’ve probably talked about almost every issue that you’re told not to talk about, that contemporary wisdom would advise one to avoid. The 2004 WE ALL HAVE AIDS campaign was an effort to continue fighting the stigma that persists around the pandemic. “We knew 20 years ago how to prevent AIDS from spreading,” Cole says, “but the stigma is still pervasive.” Proof positive: Celebrities asked to wear I HAVE AIDS T-shirts as part of the campaign refused. Cole relented when challenged to wear one, himself. Such as?

Such as a woman’s right to choose, such as the death penalty, such as the right to bear arms. Critics would tell me, “Who are you to render an opinion on the subject? Go back to making your shoes.” Would you get people storming down here, calling you, writing?

I’ve gotten a lot of irate mail over the years and a lot of phone calls. No threats, though — nothing that we ever took seriously. But there are groups that are very mobilized and very coordinated on certain issues, such as choice, such as the right to bear arms.

In the late 1980s, for example, there was this public dialogue about automatic weapons, over whether they should be legalized. I have always, over the years, avoided taking a position on issues that were perceived to be political just for the sake of being outspoken. I question the appropriateness. So back then, everybody was irate about guns in our cities, automatic weapons. And I understood that: there is no logical, contemporary argument for those to exist. They are manufactured and created for the battlefield, to kill as many people as possible in the shortest period of time. You can’t defend yourself at home with them. You can’t hunt with them. There is no real argument that supports their existence. So the ad originally was conceived to condemn the right to bear arms. And then I thought, You know? I don’t have the right to say that. As much as I strongly believe that, in that issue — eventually the ad didn’t run that way. As it eventually ran, it was, WE NEITHER CONDONE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS NOR BARE FEET. I avoided making a political statement, regardless of my impulse to want to do it. But people read it the way they wanted to, and I got a lot of criticism for it. Over the years now, whenever I’ve touched on that specific issue, I’ve gotten lots of mail, clearly organized by the NRA. And invariably, the mail tells me, “The Second Amendment gives me the right to bear arms. Who the hell do you think you are? Go back to making shoes and leave us alone.” My answer to that? The Second Amendment may, in fact, give people the right to bear arms. But the First Amendment gives me the right to tell you how I feel about it. Isn’t this a great country we live in? Is is possible to push it too far?

I realize, after a while, you can’t have constructive dialogue on some of these issues, you know, because often it just elevates — and then, invariably, I’ll start getting letters from people who will say, “I have bought my last pair of Cole-Haan shoes.” When people ask me if I’m Kenneth Cole, I search their faces to see what that means to them. I need to know if I should smile — or duck. It’s okay to be provocative, right?

Yeah, as long as it’s not for provocation’s sake, as long as it’s genuine and as long as there’s an intelligent rationale. You know, there is this cause-marketing banner that people sign up to now, but it really can’t be about marketing. Advocacy needs to be very genuine for it to work, because the audience is very sophisticated, and they see right through something that isn’t authentic. If, somehow, you can’t create a genuine connection to that audience out there, to the people you’re trying to serve, your advocacy fails.

I guess if every business person ran around telling us how they felt about social issues, I’m not sure what would happen in the world of media, but I think it could, certainly, in many ways engage us on levels that are more substantive than we’re currently often engaged.In 2004, while Cole was involved in the WE ALL HAVE AIDS campaign for amFAR, the AIDS awareness nonprofit for which he is chairman, he visited Cape Town with his children, making a stop at the Mothers2Mothers AIDS beading project.While there, he put in a large order for the nonprofit’s beaded lanyards. Do you think that in another life, you’d be a lawyer or a journalist?

I actually had enrolled in law school twice. I just never ended up going. Your dad was in the women’s shoe business, and you took a summer off to help him; his sales associate had just resigned.

I felt a responsibility to learn the business, should anything happen to my father, because this factory was feeding the entire family. My father was absolutely committed to his work and passionate about it. But it was not [my] career choice. He owned a shoe factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. What was his philosophy on marketing?

He believed that advertising was a weakness. It was a sign that you needed business. It was a way of saying to your competitiors in your industry that your business was struggling. At trade shows, for example, he’d have a small room and a conservative, low-key presentation of his offerings. And then, I came along years later and joined the business, and we’d have these discussions, and I’d say that perception can be more important than reality. And to the degree that you can create the sense that you are bigger than you are, in fact, you become how you’re perceived. So I would then want to take my father into bigger showrooms, and I’d want him to start advertising. We had very different beliefs on how you do it. Was advocacy advertising part of where you and he diverged?

With my AIDS ads, I started doing them in 1985 because I believed that I could say something important at a time when no one was saying it and that it might impact people’s lives at some level. If nothing else, I still believe I can help to make a difference by example. In 1985, if you spoke about AIDS, you were presumed to be at risk, which meant you were either Haitian, or you were an intravenous drug user, or you were gay. And that was not something that was deemed to be appropriate.

Putting myself out there at the time as a single, white male designer, we knew that I would be presumed to be gay. I am not gay but I also wasn’t uncomfortable putting myself out there, and so I did it, and I felt like I was doing something as important as anything I had ever done, not just for myself, but for the business. Have any of your advocacy ads backfired? The I HAVE AIDS campaign was one of your most controversial.

Our I HAVE AIDS campaign was instructive in that regard. We asked certain individuals who were part of the AIDS awareness campaign already if they would, at different places in the world, appear somewhere wearing a shirt that said, I HAVE AIDS. We asked everyone to do so individually, in different places in the world, over a short period of time, leading up to World AIDS Day, when we would unveil the WE ALL HAVE AIDS campaign in New York.

But at the end of the day? Nobody would do it. Nobody, practically nobody, would wear that T-shirt. And these are the most vocal and the most committed AIDS spokespeople and activists that exist. And then a reporter asked me, “Ken, would you wear it?” And I said, of course I’d wear it. Well, then I said, maybe I wouldn’t wear it. Maybe it’s not fair for me to wear an I HAVE AIDS T-shirt and for a movie star to appear wearing one anywhere, and maybe it’s not fair for my kids to have to explain that to their friends. Maybe it’s not fair for me to do that to them. And regardless of my advocacy, my passion, my commitment to this meaningful message, maybe I don’t have the right to do it to my associates. Maybe I don’t have the right to do it to my family.Cole’s 1999 YOU CAN CHANGE AN OUTFIT/YOU CAN OUTFIT CHANGE, OR BOTH series of ads promoted a variety of causes, from diversity to volunteerism. One urged equal pay in the workplace. So this put you — and forgive the pun — in their shoes?

Yeah, so I put myself in their shoes. The stigma around AIDS isn’t just a reality in Cape Town and in New Delhi and in Beijing. This is everywhere. This is right here. I was speaking yesterday at a local high school about AIDS, and one of the kids was asking me about why it is that, in my opinion, it’s so hard to get people to be as motivated and as passionate about AIDS as they are about a tsunami or the floods in New Orleans. And I think, you know, that communities tend to respond better to acute disasters more than they do to chronic problems. When we can see pictures in the newspaper and on the 6 o’clock news that make it very clear what we can do to help — and it’s often just about writing a check or expressing our dissatisfaction — then we go to bed feeling good about ourselves, knowing that we responded appropriately. But nobody really knows how to respond to AIDS. And in so many ways, the solution is behavioral. We knew 20-plus years ago how to prevent AIDS from spreading. Your billboards and ads have not just been about AIDS but have taken on other social ills and causes, including one in 1999 that advocated for equal pay, regardless of gender. You’re New York’s cause provacateur; people wait to see what you’re going to say next. I’m wondering, is there a limit to how far you can go with this stuff?

You know what? I used to think there was. I’ve always struggled with this a little bit. Initially, I was really, really conscious to not ever take a position on an issue, and I’ve tried to avoid issues because issues are perceived to be political. And to the degree one is perceived to be a political person, then their point of view is discounted because it means they have an agenda, and it means they’re not objective. That’s what having a political point of view means in this country. But is that right?

Well, it’s not right. My messages are not political messages, but instead they are social messages, human messages and they affect all of us. And I look to not allow them to be aligned in the political universe. A very recent ad campaign pictures women carrying handbags, from your latest line, and says underneath: “We’re all potential carriers” — again referring to AIDS. There’s a blogger called Copyranter who suggested last year, and I quote, that “Cole thinks it is now his inexorable right to profit off the [AIDS] disease by slapping disease-y punlines on all of his product ads.” Certainly, this blogger was being provocative by posing the question. How do you respond to this criticism?

I don’t know, I think it’s an area that I’m very sensitive to. That first AIDS campaign had models who were all barefoot because I was very concerned about people questioning our sensitivity and the perception that we could have been exploiting something so important to all of us for the wrong reasons, just to sell our shoes. And I continue to be sensitive to it, and I guess I’m always going to get those sorts of criticisms. I don’t think, though, considering how much we say and how often we say it and for how long we’ve said it, that we get as much criticism anymore. And I think people accept that it’s just what we’ve done for so many years, and it’s not a singular opportunity to exploit a singular circumstance.

Besides, it’s what I do. I talk about substantive issues that affect all of our lives in matters that are non-imposing and that hopefully don’t preach to people. There is a genuine effort to not profit from a cause because if people think that’s what’s happening, then the message fails, and we haven’t accomplished our objective. I did an ad campaign on 9/11 that was also broadly criticized.

How so?
A few months after 9/11, in our usual postseason brainstorming, we said, okay, now what should we talk about? What’s on people’s minds? What’s consuming us? What’s inspiring us? And invariably that year, there was nothing on anybody’s minds — nothing that October or November other than our safety and the people that we lost. So how do you talk about 9/11? We determined that we could not. We were all concerned about one thing, and that was our security and well-being and whether what happened to us in the past could happen to us again.
It was all reflecting back to 9/11. But nobody had really talked about 9/12. So I did a campaign about 9/12, and there were several messages. The three of them were: ON 9/12, PEOPLE WHO HADN’T SPOKEN TO THEIR PARENTS IN YEARS FORGET WHY. And another one said, ON 9/12, TAXI DRIVERS WAVED AT EACH OTHER WITH ALL FIVE FINGERS. And then a third one said, ON 9/12, 14,000 PEOPLE STILL CONTRACTED HIV. The message was that, in many profound ways, as a community, we had changed and in many others, we hadn’t. And that was the message. But I was criticized for it. People felt that I was exploiting and being questionably sensitive to something that should not have been dealt with the way that we do. But it’s just what we’ve always done. It was not an individual opportunity to take advantage of people’s emotions. It was meant to speak to them and address them, hopefully, in a respectful manner that maybe they hadn’t thought to do before. I don’t know. It was to add a perspective and dialogue to a debate that existed; not to create a new one. Cole’s 1986 ad to protest gun violence without taking sides on gun control was denounced by the National Rifle Association. “They told me to mind my own business and go back to making shoes,” Cole recalls. You said in your 2003 biography, Footnotes, that by not defining yourself, you remain open to interpretation. Where does Kenneth Cole, the brand, and Kenneth Cole, the man, diverge? The messages are my messages, they’re certainly my point of view. I don’t say things that I don’t feel. There are certain things I feel like just not saying. There’s less that I choose to say these days and there are certain things I’ve chosen not to say over the years out of respect to the circumstance. I had an ad that was going up on the West Side Highway 30 days before we entered Iraq. And it was printed and it was supposed to be posted that afternoon, and the ad said, JUST WHAT WE ALL NEED IS A NEW WAR, and then in small letters, — DROBE as in “wardrobe.” That [billboard] was about to go up but everyone said to me, You know what? You can’t have that billboard up if people are going to be coming home in body bags. Americans are dying, whether you believe in what they’re dying for or not. And I agreed, and I felt it was disrespectful and questionably appropriate, so I never ran the ad. Your Iraq War billboards never went up? That particular billboard never went up. A version of it went up about three years later, when it wasn’t as disrespectful to all those people that were committing their lives. When we first entered the war, if you advocated against it, you were perceived to be advocating against fellow Americans. I ended up running the ad three years later, but I qualified it. And what I said at the bottom of the ad was, THE LAST THING WE NEED NOW IS AN ONGOING WAR-DROBE, and then I put at the bottom: SUPPORTOURTROOPS. COM. So I exposed people to an Internet site where they could, in fact, find creative ways to support their neighbors who had put their lives on the line. You use puns a lot to express your advocacy. It’s an illness. [laughter] My brain works in these funny ways. I’ve learned over the years to contain myself at the risk of losing all my friends and offending every member of my family. [laughter] I’ve gotten better at not sharing all of these puns as they come through. I think humor — to the degree that you cannot take yourself so seriously — gives you a chance of communicating a point of view. I don’t think you can ever convince anybody to believe what you believe in — in and of itself. Nobody’s going to change their mind just because of what you say you believe. People are inclined and likely to change their minds, though, if you give them the tools to do it. Years ago, we did an awareness campaign and the message was, TO BE AWARE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT YOU WEAR. And then we empowered people with statistics, such as: 1 IN 27 PEOPLE EXECUTED IS LATER PROVEN INNOCENT. Now, there’s no greater case against the death penalty, in my mind anyway, than that specific statistic. So rather than saying the death penalty is wrong, if you empower people with knowledge that they may not have had available to them, it’s a very powerful tool. Eighty-nine percent of women carry lip and nail protection and six percent carry HIV protection. That was another one. So to the degree that you can point to absurdity and use humor as a tool, facts and statistics can be empowering. Good advertising, it’s said, uses emotion to cut through the media noise. There are some marketing statistics now that show if a company is aligned with a cause, most consumers — chiefly those aged 17-28 — will switch brands in a heartbeat. What is it about this particular generation that resonates in a different way from your own generation about cause and about the marketplace? I think the younger generation is different in a lot of ways. I think that, for the most part, it has ADD, and it’s not a clinical diagnosis as much as it is a societal one. And it’s inbred and it’s promoted and it’s encouraged. Today, younger people speak, and communicate in short quips and abbreviations. They do instant messaging. And they do it without spell-check; I’m not sure it would matter. They don’t take the time; it’s just not about that. My point is that today, we’re on sensory overload. There are so many opportunities, through the Internet, to be exposed to so much knowledge, and I think we have very short attention spans. So you need to present information in a way that’s very concise and credible, and you have to say as much as you can in as few words as possible. So in that regard, I don’t know if I’m necessarily addressing that, but I think there is a degree to which they feel social problems are being imposed upon them and they resent it. Right now, obviously, the one issue that’s pervasive is the environment, and younger adults feel that they’ve inherited this, and it’s having a very profound impact on their lives and even more significantly on their futures. And they’re concerned about it. And there are others like that. Did you see the billboard we had up about global warming on the West Side Highway? It’s a picture of the globe, and it’s melting. And then the words across, next to it, IS IT ME OR IS IT WARM IN HERE?. This is an ad that I ran around ten years ago. I thought it was time for a rerun because very often we kind of pay attention, we acknowledge, and we accept certain social circumstances, social illsbut we’re not always inclined to make lifestyle changes to fix them. Why does one need to do these things simultaneously? Well, first of all, to the degree you can, I think you win personally, and I think you win professionally. And I think if you marry your personal passions to your professional needs and goals, you can go a lot further. I have a program I started, a fellowship program at Emory University, where I went to school, and it’s on community building and social change. We take undergraduate students when they’re still appropriately idealistic and impressionable, and we teach them the skills of community building. And they’re in a classroom for a semester. They learn about — they identify the various resources, forprofit, not-for-profit, public-private sector circumstances — and then they go out into the community over the summer, and they are introduced to an initiative that somehow they can relate to because there’s a few from which they can choose. And then they come back into the classroom, the third semester, and they try to work through creative solutions, and ways of articulating the issues and hopefully figuring out how to improve upon them, if not fix them. So it’s a great discipline, and to the degree that we can embrace that earlier on in our careers, I think we all go a lot further, and everybody wins. (ABOVE) Cole’s billboard just off the West Side Highway, at 57th Street, tapped what he calls a “now-irresistible issue.” You actually get your hands dirty, too. You traveled to Cape Town and the townships to visit mothers with AIDS. You’ve been to China. You’re very active now with amFAR. What’s next? I’m so obsessed with trying to move amFAR’s mission forward, that I invariably don’t get to certain matters in a given day that I should and need to get to, in order to run this fashion company I run. But what I’ll try to do is create a synergy wherever I can. The South Africa trip was made into a family vacation, because at that time, I was doing the WE ALL HAVE AIDS campaign, and President Mandela’s office had advised us that he would be available to us to be photographed during the week that just so happened to also be my kids’ spring break, so my wife and I changed our plans on about 48 hours’ notice, and we went to South Africa, and we took a three-day safari, and then we took a five-day trip through townships and AIDS centers and treatment centers, and it was very inspiring. I think we all came back far more enriched than we would have from any other sort of trip that we might have taken, and I became a little bit more knowledgeable about the international actions around AIDS, and so forth. You can’t really address these issues locally unless you have a sense of how it really exists globally. And then I took a business trip to China, and diverged for a few days and went off with some amFAR people to visit some hospitals in Beijing. I met some Chinese AIDS patients. I just always try to find ways to combine my various demands and marry them wherever I can and find synergy. I don’t think I could probably do a lot of what I do if I didn’t have all the company’s resources to bring to bear on these issues that are the focus of a lot of my advocacy work. And without my advocacy work, I don’t think I could accomplish anywhere near what I do or would have done otherwise. And at the end of the day, I think most of us feel the company is far better for it. Your wife, Maria Cuomo, has been working for years for HELP USA, which fights domestic violence; she’s the daughter of former Gov. Mario Cuomo. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is your brother-in-law and the founder of HELP USA. Is Maria a sounding board for some of your ad campaigns? She is, as are my kids. HELP USA provides services to victims of domestic violence, not just a roof over their heads but skills training to get them back on their feet. I have the utmost respect for what Maria does; I know how hard it is to get financial support. You have three daughters. Do they have a favorite ad? I don’t know if there’s a favorite of the day, but my kids certainly also have very strong opinions and now, so do their friends. I have lots of advisors and critics. It’s wonderful.