Anomaly's New Partner on Lance and Nike

Not everyone in New York is bummed out about the rain. “It’s fantastic!” said Richard Mulder, a new partner at Anomaly, the hip, SoHo-based ad agency. “I’m Dutch so I love it. It’s just like home.”
Mulder worked at Nike for 11 years and is credited with inventing the Lance Armstrong yellow bracelet and worked on three Olympics campaigns. He joined Anomaly about three weeks ago. In a brief chat, he talked about Nike, Anomaly and agency client Jawbone.

Brandwiki: What will you be doing for Anomaly?
Richard Mulder: My official title is ‘creative catalyst,’ so you figure out where you have the most use. I’m kind of in between a lot of the functions. I work a lot with [creative chief] Mike Byrne, but I do hope that I can use the creative brains here for other things like events.
I worked with Mike five years on Nike and I hope I can get the best out of him.

BW: You were behind the Lance Armstrong bracelets? What was the story?
RM: Every year it was the same group of people pushing to do something big around Lance. So that one year when he was going to win his sixth Tour de France and it was a big story, we went through the same process and—there was already this idea because most people in the U.S. are not cycling fans but love to see an American winning, especially in France—so for them he is the yellow jersey. The first idea we had was ‘How can we own yellow?’ And the other thing that came into play was Lance came to the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year award [dinner] with Kobe Bryant, Derek Jeter, eveyone was there and Lance walks in and they gave him a standing ovation, like he’s the man. That got me thinking like if people knew that their hero had another hero who’s Lance Armstrong that’s the way to connect to the 14 year-old kid. And the yellow thing came back. And that’s where the yellow band came in...It was that simple. I think we’re up to 70 million now or something.

BW: Why did you leave Nike to come to Anomaly?
RM: Well, I’ve been 11 years there and it was going to be my fourth Olympics that I was going to be working on and my eighth European championship and at some point you have to be careful because it’s so hard not become formulaic when you’ve been through it so many times. You start cutting corners and at some point you become more of a mentor and you have to show people how to do it and I’m not a coach yet. I like it, but I want to play too.

BW: What are you working on now?
RM: I am getting my arms around Jawbone, which is a very interesting business problem and opportunity at the same time.

BW: What’s Jawbone?
RM: It’s a Bluetooth headset with noise cancellation technology, beautifully designed, state of the art I mean you can wear it in a club and make a phone call.

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I'm confused by this as I've always seen references that Kevin Carroll, former Katalyst for Nike, was the inspiration for the Livestrong Band. See this article: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=bands
What's the story?

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