I never met Bob Sunland. But advertising could sure use a few fucking more like him.

Bob Sunland wore the same goddamn sweater every day—wool, with leather elbow patches, like a junior college professor who smelled faintly of soup and lived in fear of natural light. 

“Professorial” was the polite term. “Odiferous” was closer to the truth.

This was Southern California. August. Ninety-five degrees. Bob was out stewing in his own juices, riding the Rapid Transit District like a man with nothing left to lose and no Uber account. 

The buses stopped in all the wrong places—alleys where the air reeked of human despair and radiator fluid, where dreams went to hemorrhage in the sun. The kind of neighborhoods where even stray dogs look over their shoulders.

Bob’s world.

Bob worked at a freakshow called Chiat/Day—maybe you’ve heard of them. 

Maybe not. 

Depends if you ever believed advertising could be more than a Ponzi scheme in khakis. Chiat/Day tolerated the untamable. Encouraged the bizarre. Hell, they even paid for it.

Bob Sunland wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t polished. He wasn’t even particularly presentable. He was bristly. Baffling. And God almighty, he was brilliant.

One of his Motel 6 headlines? “All Rooms Look the Same in the Dark.”

Another? “We Give You Fewer Ugly Paintings.”

No Cannes Lion. No celebratory tweetstorm. Just a couple rounds fired into the gut of mediocrity.

I never met Bob. I never met David Fowler, another eccentric, who later made Motel 6 infamous alongside Tom Bodett, that velvet-voiced motel maven with a lamp fetish.

But I was told those Bob Sunland headlines by my dad—Guy Day—the guy who co-founded the madhouse that tolerated Sunland and all his peculiarities. 

A place where brilliant minds were allowed to run red lights without permission slips from HR. 

Chiat/Day was no utopia. There was shrapnel. It was war. 

And Bob Sunland was a grenade. 

No wellness apps. No culture committee pizza parties. No half-day Fridays.

Just raw, uncut, unmedicated creativity that stank to high heaven and changed the fucking game.

These days? 

Eccentricity gets shown the door. Noncompliance is a firing offense. Originality is a “performance concern.” 

The Bob Sunlands of the world are buried under the thick carpet of forced collaboration and fake cheer. Rapid ideation sessions.

We’ve replaced wildcards with wet napkins. Edge with algorithms. Genius with goddamn compliance training.

Let’s talk about another eccentric, shall we? 

Steve fucking Jobs.

Steve Jobs was a notorious prick, but at least he knew what he wanted—he wanted to be Bob Sunland with a private jet.

Let’s talk about another eccentric.  

He hated “Here’s to the Crazies” when Lee Clow showed it to him. 

Hated it Rabowski’s script with a vengeance… until he didn’t.

You think Jobs was an easy client? 

You think Chiat/Day was a smooth ride? 

Christ, they both got fired from Apple. 

Thrown off their own rocket ships. And then they came back and snent the rocket ship into a whole other stratosphere. 

Because that’s what eccentrics do. 

They get canned, they get mocked, and then they get immortalized.

You’ve probably never heard of Bob Sunland.

 Hell, I may have butchered the spelling of his name. 

But I remember his thinking and what he represented in my mind. 

God bless the ones who make it harder. 

The Hahns. The Wiedens. The Clows.

Who may make it painful and but in the final analysis, also make it 100 fucking percent worth being attached to even if it leaves a scar. 

God bless the Bob Sunlands.

#theadvertisingsurvivalguide

Cameron Day has written three books on survival. He has never been dropped in a jungle with no food and filmed for a television audience. He has very nearly survived advertising and been thrown from more horses than he cares to remember. He doesn't have to. He wrote it all down and published it.