The Advertising GURU

Back in 1997, around the time the award-winning Coconut Grove ad agency Crispin & Porter became Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Alex Bogusky described the advantages of making a public service ad over that for a consumer product. “You have more license to be outrageous,” he told a Miami Herald reporter. “A cause is a cause, not a label for a product, and that instantly gives a little more freedom.”

In many respects, it has been Bogusky’s willingness to be outrageous, to push his clients to the edge, that has turned him into a revered ad guru. Just months after the 1997 interview, his firm won the state of Florida’s largest advertising account, a $60 million public service campaign against tobacco.

The campaign, which carried the ambitious title of The Truth Campaign, catapulted Bogusky’s firm onto the national scene. Aimed at dissuading 12- to 17-year-olds from smoking, it featured shocking images of body bags and tobacco executives awarded for the “greatest number of deaths in a single year.” By the following year, the Miami firm had won an $185 million contract to take the anti-smoking message nationwide, and Bogusky and his creative team went to work undermining the same tobacco use and addiction that previous advertisers worked so hard to create. Independent studies have credited the campaign with helping save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in healthcare costs.

Ever since, Bogusky and his partners have been breaking ground. Now, CP+B is a “media agnostic,” exploiting instant messaging, social networks and YouTube as well as traditional media to get his clients’ message out. They often use consumers to play the role of distributors—particularly through the Internet—in viral advertising. Such a strategy requires an initial message attractive enough to start a buzz, and for that Bogusky’s shocking style—aimed at causing “cultural tension”—is a winner.

Since the days of its public service anti-smoking campaign, CP+B’s client base has grown to include some high profile private companies, such as BMW, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Burger King, Google, Volkswagen, Miller Lite and Sprite. Often recognized as best of the year by industry publications, CP+B became a $1 billion agency in 2006.

And that was before it landed the $300-million Microsoft Corp. account last year, which pits Bogusky’s firm against the tremendously successful “Hello, I’m a Mac... and I’m a PC” campaign for Apple computers. The result has generated mixed reviews in the advertising world, and raised many questions about what, if anything, went wrong. Bogusky is clearly in no hurry to answer, probably because, as it seems to be often the case, he is perfectly happy with things the way they are. After all, the bigger the mystery, the longer the buzz may stay alive.

[PODER ENTERPRISE] How did you begin your career?

[ALEX BOGUSKY] My mom taught me how to do mechanical [drawings]. She said if I knew how to work in a studio I’d always have a job—so I learned it as a trade. It’s actually sort of a family business, both my parents were designers.

[PE] When and how did you realize you had the creativity needed in advertising?

[AB] I got a job doing mechanicals [and] studio work in a small agency. I hadn’t really thought much about advertising, and the work they were doing there at the time was very average—but they had annuals on the shelves, and I discovered people who were really good at the craft , people I could learn from. Fallon, at the time, was reinvigorating the idea of big ideas—the kind that had completely gone from the big New York shops. Puns were really big too.

[PE] What was your first campaign?

[AB] Some little magazine ads for a property development in Florida called Amelia Island. I couldn’t say there was a concept but I worked very hard with an illustrator to make them pretty.

[PE] Your favorite campaign from CP+B? Or by another agency?

[AB] I don’t live in the past.

[PE] When you take on a new product or brand to advertise, is there a process you put that product through in order to understand how to market it?

[AB] There are lots of processes you use. The first is to use it and live it—we call it method advertising. It’s named after method acting, but oddly enough a funny thing happened when we were helping launch Method, (the line of well-designed natural home cleaning products). They [company executives] were talking about the product and said it was so natural you could drink it. So I took some window cleaner, poured it into a glass and drank it. The look on their faces was one of utter shock—I grew concerned that they were full of shit. They assured me I would be fine and I was, but it took about 48 hours to get the taste out of my mouth. If I would have been hospitalized, I guess our advertising would have been very different. It is also key to knowing the entire history of a product and a brand, to know the ups and downs and the personalities that were there in the early days. If you know this stuff , you know where you can and can’t go. What you can own and what you will never touch.

Finally, you need to get a sense of what consumers think. But, if I had to give up knowing something, and still be responsible for success—it would be that last part. The consumer can only tell you where you are and where you’ve been, not where you need to go. I’d rather make a campaign where the consumer actually contributes to building the new brand.

[PE] How has viral marketing affected advertising?

[AB] I don’t think there is such a thing as viral advertising—it’s simply an attribute, not a type of advertising. It’s like funny or dramatic; there is funny advertising and there is dramatic advertising. There is even advertising that attempts to be funny that isn’t, just like there is advertising that attempts to be viral but isn’t. Calling it such won’t make it so, though there are people that make a living doing just that. So, the possibility for an idea to go viral isn’t new. What is new is the plethora of tools available to facilitate that process for citizens, and a deeper understanding of some of the triggers to that behavior. For me it hasn’t changed anything, I got into advertising because I saw a distinct possibility to interact with people in a way that design didn’t seem to afford. And that process has been helped along by technologies that are connecting us all in ways that we didn’t dare dream of just a few short years ago.

[PE] Yet it’s always a coup when a campaign does go viral. How has the Internet changed your business?

[AB] Well for me it has to start with a cultural tension: a little bit of who we are and where we’re going that hasn’t been settled. That’s a magic ingredient. And then, that tension has to be one that the brand has permission to play with; it has to be within “who they are and what they do.” Once you have this combination, it’s really just a matter of tailoring the work to each media in the way the media wants to tell the story. They all will be different and each will play a different role. TV is a powerful catalyst for viral but you have to know what it can—and wants—to do best. Same with the web; don’t just ask it to do what the TV did except on a smaller screen. People want to socialize online and they sometimes use a campaign to do it, but only if it says something —specifically if it says the right thing about them.

[PE] What is the role of technology in today’s advertising?

[AB] You can use technology to inspire new ideas, or you can keep aware of technology and wait until you need to put it into service of an idea. Either one is viable I’ve done and seen both. I prefer the latter.

[PE] Times are tough right now, and advertising has been deeply affected. What’s your outlook for the U.S.?

[AB] I have no idea, but I’m comfortable with that. To me this crisis is a failure of a system of ‘public’ companies that has happened before to greater and lesser degrees, and will happen again with more frequency unless we fix the underpinnings. Quarterly improvement on a purely financial basis isn’t a very enlightened form of free enterprise, and it creates a dynamic that will at best do what it has done before—simply at an accelerated and more violent basis. Personally, I’m bullish on our shared intelligence. I think our understanding of the big picture worldwide will lead to a system that takes into consideration true costs of doing business. If we can’t externalize costs as a way of making a quarter look profitable then we won’t. And, a longer-term approach to healthy companies, employees and environment will prevail. My hope is that this crisis is the first step.