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8 TIPS FOR RUNNING SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTIONS TO ENSURE LEGAL COMPLIANCE, BUILD BUZZ AND ENCOURAGE UGC

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If you’re looking to gain even more traction with social promotions like contests and sweepstakes here are eight additional tips to enhance your next social media campaign courtesy of Ben Pickering, author of How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest. 

Ensure Your Promotion Doesn’t Get You In Hot Water

It’s difficult to run a successful campaign if your promotion is blocked, removed or challenged in a court of law. So before we get to the fun part of marketing, there are a few logistical tips to keep in mind.

#1: Running a Facebook Promotion Requires an App

Much has been written about the Facebook Promotional Guidelines and how to run a compliant promotion. The guidelines have evolved, but the most important requirement remains the same: any promotion (i.e., something where a consumer enters for a chance to win a prize) on Facebook must be handled through an app.

If you know what you’re doing, you could develop your own Facebook app, but you might prefer to personalize an “off-the-shelf” app by a variety of companies such as:

• North Social 
• Wildfire
• Strutta

Some are inexpensive and no-frills, while others provide a more robust set of features and options to connect you with your customers and personalize the experience.

If you choose a third-party app provider, choose a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer so you can feel confident you’re in compliance with Facebook’s platform policies.

Look for developers and platforms that display this badge with the Apps qualification.

#2: Twitter Promotions Must Provide Rules Disclosure

Any contest or sweepstakes must provide participants with terms and conditions of entry and Twitter is no exception. With only 140 characters to work with, this becomes one of the bigger challenges of running a Twitter-based promotion.

The easiest way to address this is to host the rules on a separate web page and include a short link when tweeting about the contest. Alternatively you can host a landing page with all of the contest details and requirements and direct traffic to that page, rather than having the interaction take place within the Twitter stream.

For larger-scale promotions, you may wish to utilize a third-party service such as CMP.LY to ensure compliance.

In this example, the CMP.LY service is used to provide a short URL linking to the terms of the promotion whenever it is shared on Twitter.

#3: Beware of the Lottery

No, I’m not worried about you blowing your paycheck on Powerball. But lotteries are the domain of the government and you want to ensure your promotion isn’t deemed an illegal lottery.

Any promotion that contains the following THREE elements is considered a lottery: 

• prize 
• element of chance in winner selection 
• consideration (cash payment, purchase requirement or extensive effort required to enter)

Since you wouldn’t have much of a promotion without a prize, you must eliminate either chance or consideration (or best of all, both) to steer clear of potential legal concerns.

Tips to Build Buzz

Once you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s on the legal and policy side, it’s time to think about how to drive traffic and build momentum for your promotion.

#4: Make it Easy for Users to Share

This is the most important tip when it comes to marketing. Much of the value in a social promotion comes from the increased ease for participants to share your promotion through their social graph.

One of the reasons contests such as “Retweet to Win” are so popular is the nearly frictionless sharing. If you’re using an app on Facebook to encourage viral sharing, ensure that the sharing options are easy and intuitive.

However, it’s also important to be aware that over-sharing can lead to the perception of spam, so it’s important to strike the right balance.

Note: It’s against Facebook policy to directly reward a user for sharing. You may use Facebook apps to reward referrals, but be careful not to directly incentivize sharing.

Integrated share tools make it easy for contest participants to share if they want to.

#5: Regularly Promote Your Contest

Contest organizers will often schedule a bunch of communications when a promotion launches, then fail to maintain communication throughout the campaign.

Be sure to share key milestones and events (e.g., contest round ending, finalists being selected, just reached 100 or 10,000 entries).

If you’re running a user-generated content promotion, it’s also a great opportunity to share content (e.g., popular or unique entries) that will drive greater engagement.

When posting about your promotion on Facebook, be sure to utilize the pinned post feature to keep the post visible at the top of the timeline.

And don’t forget to utilize all of your social channels—it’s OK to promote your Facebook contest on Twitter and Google+.

In this example, a compelling image is used to draw attention and a direct link to the contest app is provided.

#6: Amplify Your Message Through Partners

Tap into the power of partner marketing by including sponsors and providing them with exposure in exchange for cross-promotion.

Also be sure to identify influencers (journalists, bloggers, etc.) whom you canreach out to and share news about your promotion.

If you’re running a contest with a judging component to evaluate entries, you may want to invite influencers to be a part of the judging panel. Attaching their name to your contest adds credibility and gives them a good reason to talk about it!

PR firm Affect tapped influential people in the PR and marketing world to serve as judges and help them find the ultimate summer intern.

Tips for Contests Featuring User-Generated Content

I am a big believer in the power of user-generated content promotions, but having been involved with many over the past five years, there are a couple of key lessons I’ve learned.

#7: Prime the Pump

Any time you’re asking users to submit content into a promotion, it’s a good idea to seed the contest with a few submissions.

These can be sample entries that you create which are not eligible to win or submissions from participants who have been encouraged to enter early.

In this contest run by Social Media Examiner's own Mike Stelzner, Mike provided his own sample entry to help inspire participants.

The key is to have some entries right away to break the ice and provide others with inspiration for their own submission.

#8: Think Twice Before Relying Solely on the Court of Public Opinion

Contests featuring user-generated content often incorporate a component of public voting. This is something I would encourage because it drives greater virality, with participants naturally incentivized to share their entries and voters taking an active role in the outcome.

However, if your contest is decided 100% by public voting, you need to be prepared to relinquish control of the outcome to those individuals with the largest social networks and/or those using vote-swapping and other tricks to try to game the system.

The most popular contest model among our clients uses a round of voting to narrow the field of entries down to a predetermined number of finalists, and a panel of judges then decides the winner.

By employing a set of predefined judging criteria, the client is able to retain some discretion over who is named the winner(s) while still generating a lot of voting and sharing activity up front.

Another option is to use judging criteria to select finalists and then open it to voting. Regardless of your preferred contest model, ensure that your platform of choice is well-equipped to handle voting and the potential challenges that come along with it.

A Success Story

Recently Mari Smith launched her very first contest. Mari wanted to do something fun and rewarding for her fans, and to introduce a new webinar she was hosting. She was consistently enthusiastic about delivering a great experience for her community and utilized many of the tips outlined above.

Mari did a great job of promoting the contest and keeping fans engaged by profiling interesting segments along the way.

Mari invited everyone to submit their Facebook cover photo for a chance to win a Facebook Makeover valued at $1,000. In just three weeks, the promotion received nearly 400 entries, which in turn generated 1,500 shares and more than 3,000 click-throughs.

An additional 2,000 people subsequently participated as entrants or voters as a direct result of another entrant sharing the promotion with them.

The contest received more than 25,000 visits in just three weeks, providing great exposure for Mari and generating a significant number of signups to her webinar.

I’ve seen companies of all sizes use promotions in a similar fashion to inexpensivelyacquire and engage fans, build awareness for a new product and ultimately drive conversions to sales.

What do you think? What would you like a social promotion to do for you?Please join in the discussion below.

COMMENTARY:    Here are 7 simple steps to launching a successful social media promotion by Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media in an article that appeared in All Things WOM:

1. Build a community first. Too often, companies think that if they create an exciting contest or sweepstakes, it’ll “go viral” and bring them lots of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. That may happen, but you’re much more likely to succeed with your social media promotion if you already have an established Facebook or Twitter and blog community.
2. Define your goal carefully. Are you looking for increased targeted likes? Website traffic? Leads? Buzz? Sales? Your goal will inform what kind of promotion you put together, the budget and length of the promotion, and success metrics.
3. Create a simple experience. Elaborate contests can be fun to envision, but too often are complex and ask too much of consumers to enter. It’s a lot to ask people to create videos, for instance, but easier to ask them to upload photos and even easier to ask them to answer a question.
4. Understand the laws of the land. When you run a contest or sweepstakes, you have to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted in your rules. In social media, it’s even more complicated, as Facebook has its own set of ever-changing Promotions Guidelines to plan around.
5. Choose a great tool to help you. Two of the best-known social media promotions tools are WildfireApp and Strutta, but there are lots of social media promo companies worth looking at. When setting up your promotion, keep in mind not only how easy it is to enter, but also how easy and compelling it is to share across social networks.
6. Include a social network media budget to support the promotion. You wouldn’t host an offline sweepstakes without a media budget to support it, so don’t expect to host an online promo without an advertising budget. Ideally, the media should be spent on the social platform where the promotion resides. So if it’s on Facebook, run Facebook ads. On Twitter, run Promoted Tweets.
7. Track results and iterate for the future. Unlike offline promotions, which may take a year to plan and execute, social media promotions can be planned and executed a lot faster, giving you more time to look at the results and make changes for the near future. Whatever success looks like to your brand, it can always be better, so the more you track, the more you can analyze and improve.

Above all else, take off your marketing cap, put on your consumer cap, and ask yourself, “Would I be excited to enter this contest and tell all of my friends about it? Is this easy enough to enter? Is the prize right?” If the answers to these questions are all “YES”, you’re well on your way to launching a successful social media promotion.

Want to know how the pro's design winning sales promotions? Check out social media expert Jeff Bullas' Top 10 Best Facebook Campaigns for 2010.

Courtesy of an article dated June 28, 2012 appearing in Social Media Examiner and an article dated June 21, 2011 appearing in AllThingsWOM and an article dated March 1, 2011 appearing in Jeff Bullas blog

UNREASONABLE AT SEA, THE FIRST OCEAN-GOING STARTUP INCUBATOR WITH A CAMPUS-ON-A-SHIP BEGINS SAILING IN 2013

The ship MV Explorer will serve as a Semester at Sea and Unreasonable at Sea's tech incubator floating campus beginning in 2013 (Click Image To Enlarge)    

Last year, we wrote about Blueseed, an incubator-on-a-ship that is anchored near Silicon Valley.

We think we’ve found something cooler. Check out Unreasonable at Sea, an accelerator program geared towards tech entrepreneurs who want to take their products to different shores.

Unreasonable at Sea will make port at 14 different countries and circumnavigate the globe during its 100-day incubator program aboard the MV Explorer (Click Image To Enlarge)

They are doing it quite literally too: Ten teams from around the globe will participate in a 100-day program aboard a ship that will port at 14 different countries (subject to changes):

• EMBARK: San Diego, CA, USA
• Hilo, Hawaii
• Yokohama, Japan
• Kobe, Japan
• Shanghai, China
• Hong Kong
• Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Singapore
• Penang, Malaysia
• Cochin, India
• Port Louis, Mauritius
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Tema (Accra), Ghana
• Casablanca, Morocco
• DEBARK: Barcelona, Spain

Curious? Watch this 3-minute trailer:

 

If you think this is some kind of extended cruise trip, you’re wrong. Teams will be expected to perfect, tweak, and adjust their business model and product. Daily workshops will be held by mentors on the ship.

When porting at the different countries, events will be held to put these entrepreneurs in front of their land-based peers, as well as investors, politicians, and philanthropists. An opportunity will also be presented for them to test their products in various markets.

Which is a lot of hard work.

General Requirements To Quality 

To be eligible for this accelerator your company must meet the following requirements:  

• Your company must be for-profit. 
• Your company must be technology-based. 
• Your company should consist of at least two people. 
• You must also have a prototype, and prove that it is highly-scalable and has the potential to gain user traction. 
• Being revenue-generating is a plus. 

This accelerator, a collaboration between Semester at Sea and Unreasonable Institute, will start in January 2013. Applications close on 15th May 2012.

Some of the mentors that will join the program include: Ben Casnocha, co-author of The Start-Up of You, as well as George Kembel, who leads the Institute for Design at Stanford.

I guess spending 100 days out at sea is an experience very few have gone through, so expect some tough competition for a place.

Here’s the kicker: The cost of attending the program, estimated at US$120K per team, will be sponsored. On top of that, you’ll get a US$500 stipend for the whole trip.

But if you’re prone to sea-sickness, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

COMMENTARY:    If you read through the Unreasonable at Sea website you will find that this is a very serious incubator program, and it is going to be very selective.  You will be expected to meet ALL the criteria (see below) in order to quality for selection.   

Unreasonable at Sea is looking for entrepreneurs using technology to address massive social or environmental problems and using certain types of technologies.  This incubator program is not for social networks, mobile app developers, game makers, and so forth.   

The selected entrepreneurial teams will be quite unique and will undero brutal schedules that will include long hours in the class room and mentoring, meetings and presentations at each port of call, and very little sleep.   This is not your normal party boat.

This would be a perfect situation for a reality TV program.  Wish I had the time and financial resources to do it myself. 

Full Criteria To Qualify

You Must Answer YES to All The Following

• Is your company using technology to address a massive social or environmental problem?  We are looking for ventures focusing on telemedicine, mobile banking, clean-tech, democratized education, disaster relief…etc. In short, we are searching for companies leveraging technology to have significant impact.
• Is your company at a stage where it is strategic to work  internationally?  Unreasonable at Sea presents an incredible opportunity to leverage technologies that are already working in one market, and help move them globally. We are looking for companies who can convince us that their company will benefit wildly from the experience of an international accelerator at sea.
• Are you currently working full time on your venture?  A full-time commitment is defined as a minimum of 40 hours per week.
• Do you have at least one team member who is currently working full-time with you?   We believe in the power of teams and will only accept applications on behalf of teams that are at least 2 people in size. If you have 100 employees and individuals on your team, that is ok with us, but if you are going at this alone, we will not read your application.
• At minimum, do you have a prototype to market or have you run a pilot?  We do not select ventures at an idea stage. You must have a prototype or have completed a pilot program at minimum to be accepted. As noted above, we prefer to work with companies ready to scale internationally and who have already gained significant traction in at least one market.
• Is your venture a for-profit company?  We are capitalists at heart in that we believe in the power of markets to solve needs at scale. Consequently we do not work with NGO’s or non-profit organizations.
• Has your venture generated at least $1 in revenue from selling a core product or service?  We hold all companies who apply to this standard unless there is a compelling reason they have not yet sold their product or service (for example, many bio-tech companies need to run years of trials before they can sell a product).
• Do you have a relentless entrepreneurial spirit & are you hungry to take your venture to global scale?  You get where we are going with this.
• Are you 18 years of age or older?  You could be 80 years old, but due to a number of legal issues, we can’t accept applications under the age of 18.
• Are you a Founder or Co-Founder of your organization?  Although we will be accepting 2 to 3 individuals from each company selected, we insist that the founder or co-founder joins us on the voyage.
• Are you able to make key, high-level, direction-shifting decisions?  (such as investment and major partnerships) on behalf of your organization? Typically, this is the role of a CEO or CTO, but doesn’t necessarily have to be.
• Can you read, write, and speak in English fluently?  The entire program will be taught in English. English doesn’t need to be your first language, nor do you need to be prolific in English, but you will need to be able to read, write, and speak in English. 

If accepted, will you be able to attend the ENTIRE Unreasonable at Sea program from January 6, 2013 –April 25, 2013.

Semester at Sea

The mission of Semester at Sea is to educate individuals with the global understanding necessary to address the challenges of our interdependent world. Established in 1963, Semester at Sea is the only study abroad program of its kind in the world. Using a ship as a traveling campus, undergraduates, lifelong learners, faculty, and lecturers live and learn together while circumnavigating the globe each fall and spring semester and exploring a world region each May and summer term. To date, Semester at Sea has launched 100 voyages, educated more than 50,000 students from 1,500 universities, and traveled to more than 60 countries.

Unreasonable Institute

The Unreasonable Institute is a mentorship-driven acceleration program for entrepreneurs tackling social and environmental problems. Each year, the Institute unites 25 entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe to live under the same roof for six weeks in Boulder, Colorado. These entrepreneurs receive training from 50 world-class mentors, ranging from the Former Director of Google.org, to the CTO of HP, to an entrepreneur who’s enabled over 19 million farmers to move out of poverty. In the process, they form relationships with 20 investment funds, receive legal advice & design consulting, and pitch to hundreds of investors and partners. 

After seeing the success of the model of the Unreasonable Institute, it’s founder,Daniel Epstein, is eager to launch Unreasonable at Sea with a new approach. Instead of uniting entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial Hub of Boulder (as Institute does), this accelerator will take place on a ship as it travels more than 25,000 nautical miles around the globe to 14 international destinations. 

Courtesy of an article dated April 18, 2012 appearing in SGEntrepreneurs

HOW BBH LABS GUERILLA MARKETING TACTIC TO USE THE HOMELESS PEOPLE AS WIFI HOTSPOTS AT THE SXSW CONFERENCE 2012 BACKFIRED

AUSTIN, Tex. — Which product at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) technology conference received more attention than perhaps any other?

Homeless people as wireless transmitters.

A marketing agency touched off a wave of criticism and debate when it hired members of the local homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering conferencegoers Internet access in exchange for donations.

 

BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, outfitted 13 volunteers from a homeless shelter with the devices, business cards and T-shirts bearing their names:

“I’m Clarence, a 4G Hotspot.”

They were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the conference, which has become a magnet for those who want to chase the latest in technology trends.

Click Image To Enlarge

The smartphone-toting, social-networking crowds often overwhelm cellular networks in the area, creating a market that BBH Labs hoped to serve with the “Homeless Hotspots” project, which it called a “charitable experiment.” It paid each participant $20 a day, and they were also able to keep whatever customers donated in exchange for the wireless service.

But as word of the project spread on the ground and online, it hit a nerve among many who said that turning down-and-out people into wireless towers was exploitative and discomfiting.

Tim Carmody, a blogger at Wired, described the project as “completely problematic” and sounding like “something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

A commenter on the BBH Labs blog offered mock praise for the project, then complained that

“My homeless hotspot keeps wandering out of range, and it’s ruining all my day trades!”

On Monday, the project’s scheduled last day, BBH Labs was scrambling to explain itself.

Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs who oversaw the project, said the company was not taking advantage of the homeless volunteers. He said that the company had had success with other such experiments, including one in which it gave homeless people in New York cellphones and Twitter accounts as a way to call attention to their plight.

Homeless Hotspots locations in downtown Austin, Texas (Click Image To Enlarge)

Mr. Radia said he modeled the hot spot project after the street newspapers that homeless people sell for a dollar.

He said.  

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people.  The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Mitchell Gibbs, the director of development at Front Steps, the shelter that houses the project volunteers, said he advised Mr. Radia on how best to set up the program. He said he was surprised by all the criticism of the project, which he said had inspired an “entrepreneurial spirit” among its homeless participants.

Mr. Gibbs said.  

“It’s an employment opportunity, regardless of who is offering it.”

Click Image To Enlarge

The human hot spots seemed unconcerned as well. One volunteer, Clarence Jones, 54, said he was originally from New Orleans and became homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 

Mr. Jones said.

“Everyone thinks I’m getting the rough end of the stick, but I don’t feel that.  I love talking to people and it’s a job. An honest day of work and pay.”

But the program’s critics zeroed in on the divide between its impoverished vendors and Internet-bubble customers.

Adam Hanft, chief executive of the marketing advisory firm Hanft Projects, said that even if the effort was well intended, it seemed to turn a blind eye to that disconnect.  He said.  

“There is already a sense that the Internet community has become so absurdly self-involved that they don’t think there’s any world outside of theirs.” 

COMMENTARY:   This is a great example of Guerilla marketing gone awry.  Well intended as it was, it was criticized for being exploitive of the homeless, and deservedly so.  Here are my reasons: First, I question the feasibility of hiring homeless people to act as WIFI hotspots.  Second, WIFI has a very limited range.  Homeless hotspots has a 20-ft range.   Third, homeless hotspots participants have to find a place hangout like a Starbucks or fast food restaurant as a homebase, or just stand in the middle of the sidewalk.  Some establishments may not want to attract homeless people because this might turnoff their paying customers.  You can't even pass out flyers or singup voters in front of a Starbucks.   Fourth, paying homeless people $20.00 a day to serve as a wandering WIFI hotspot is not exactly what I call "fair" pay in my opinion.  I know of homeless and students who make minimum hourly wage for holding up "Sale" and "Going out of business" signs on street corners.  Fifth, other companies may try to copy this idea to promote their products or services on the "cheap," by hiring homeless people. This is already going on right now.  Sixth, bringing attention to the homeless problem in America is not something most people care about.  A lot of people ignore the homeless, stereotype them as pandhandlers, lazy, drinkers, infected, and so forth.   So before you embark on similar schemes that could be seen as exploitation of homeless or disabled workers, think again.  This was really a bad idea to use homeless people in this fashion.  

Courtesy of an article dated March 12, 2012 appearing in The New York Times

NIKE UNVEILS MAG, A 'BACK TO THE FUTURE II' LIMITED EDITION SHOE, ONLY 1,500 PAIRS, TO RAISE FUNDS FOR THE MICHAEL J. FOX FOUNDATION

In 2015, Marty McFly slipped on a pair of Nike Air Power Laces, white-and-gray high-tops with teal specks and wrap-around ankle straps, which self-fastened electronically. Now, four years earlier, Nike is going Back To The Future (er, forward to the past) to re-release the movie's famous sneakers--and from what we've seen, the 2011 Nike MAGs, as they're called, are as slick as the DeLorean DMC-12 they arrived in.

 

Teased in a YouTube video uploaded by "DocEmmettBrown88," the clip gives viewers an inside look at "McFly's closet," a warehouse of shelves lined end to end with the glowing kicks. The video has already racked up nearly 200,000 hits in just two days, suggesting that for fans of the film, this shoe is the best news since, well, Huey Lewis And The News.

The actual Nike MAG is almost everything we'd hoped for. Featuring glowing LED panels and an electroluminescent Nike logo on the strap, the 2011 MAG was designed to be a "precise replica" of the original shoe, according to Nike, and an upgrade to the 1989 Nike Air Mag "McFly." The lights can be turned on with a pinch of the high-top's "ear," and each charge will keep the LEDs glowing for five hours--meaning you won't need 1.21 gigawatts of power after all.

 

 

Still, the shoe seems to be missing one crucial feature: self-tightening laces. Nike filed a patent for an "Automatic Lacing System" back in 2009, but it appears the technology didn't make its way into the shoe.

McFly's sneaker makes its return at a time when the film trilogy, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, is universally considered a pop culture classic. The 2011 Nike MAG is a retro (rather than sold-out) piece of merchandising that will likely find love all over, from hipster to hip-hop sneaker-snobs--similar to PF Flyers, made famous by The Sandlot, which were resurrected in 2003.

But to get your hands on a pair of 2011 MAGs will be tough: Nike plans to release only 1,500 pairs of the shoes, all to be auctioned on eBay starting tonight at 8:30 p.m. PST. Net proceeds of the 10-day auction will go toward fighting Parkinson's disease thanks to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which will match all donations up to $50 million.

[Click here to see the eBay auction. Be warned: Prices are already well into the thousands]

[Click Image To Enlarge]

COMMENTARY:    Those are cool shoes, but I would spend my money on an AutoMoto.  I just checked the bids on eBay, and the bidded prices so far range between $2,550 and $4,650.  Check the bids below. That's pretty Incredible.  Will the shoes go for $10,000?  Make a guess.

[Click Image To Enlarge]

Courtesy of an article dated September 9, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

 

 

 

THE BUSINESS OF GIVING: PHILANTHROPISTS, FOUNDATIONS, GENEROUS COMPANIES, POPULAR SOCIAL CAUSES AND CHARITIES

As the economy struggles to rebound and households continue to scale back on spending, there is an increasing trend in the business world toward investing in corporate social responsibility. Even in these tough economic times, companies realize the importance of supporting local communities and philanthropic causes. Supporting a cause that positively reflects on a brand and its core values demonstrates a commitment to making a difference. Today’s #E2sday looks at “The Business of Giving” and how companies are making an impact on philanthropies.

COMMENTARY:   I have been very tough with the pharmaceutical industry, but after realizing just how much the industry gives to charity and needed social causes, I like what they have done, but if they really wanted to help, they should drop the prices on their drugs.  

I have to admit that I have been very tough on Microsoft and Bill Gates, but since his reitrement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has  pledged to give away $28 billion of Bill Gates networth, to social causes worldwide. 

Courtesy of an article dated June 7, 2011 appearing in Socialcast Blog 

ALEX BOGUSKY: WHY HE LEFT CRISPIN PORTER + BOGUSKY AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS CAREER TO FIND HIS SOUL

 

Alex Bogusky, the Elvis of advertising, has left the business. Is this a New Age midlife crisis or his greatest rebranding campaign?

Alex Bogusky, advertising Dadaist, postmodern media manipulator, pop-culture Houdini, daddy of 21st-century advertising, and now a seeker of meaning on the dirt path of life, invites me and his monk into the FearLess Cottage. Inside the quaint cherry-brick-and-wood house, so placidly typical of Bogusky's adopted hometown of Boulder, Colorado, are the props of an adman attempting rehab. There are the wrinkled tubes of acrylic paint lying like fallen soldiers next to a canvas and easel, an acoustic guitar alongside a cowhide chair, and a wood-framed mirror from Bogusky's former Crispin Porter + Bogusky client Russ Klein, Burger King's ex-president of global marketing. Inscribed on the mirror is a quote from Mother Teresa. "If you are kind," reads the gift, "people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway."

It is mid-May, three months after Bogusky quit Crispin, a month and a half before he will abandon the advertising business altogether. The monk and I are among the first guests to visit the FearLess Cottage. The monk, in essence, was Bogusky's going-away present to Crispin; last December, Bogusky hired Greg, a late fortysomething from Wisconsin who recently spent six years in absolute silence in a bamboo hut in Burma, to teach "mindfulness classes" at Crispin's Boulder office. Back then, Bogusky was still cochair-man of the hottest ad shop in the country -- last year, Advertising Age crowned Crispin both Agency of the Year and Agency of the Decade -- but within five minutes of meeting the monk, he explained that he was existentially stuck. "Now I think some people are worried the monk will go away since I'm not there," says Bogusky. "I was looking for his next benefactor, but then I was like, The monk is cheap, I'll just pay for the monk." Greg, whose translucent blue eyes suggest that all his troubles are behind him, gives me his take on Bogusky's transformation: "Alex's struggle was around doing good in the world and the sense that it may not matter, that it's not going to have a big enough impact soon enough or fast enough."

(1) The FearLess Cottage Bogusky has made this the Boulder center of his post-Crispin reinvention, and a hub for activists and entrepreneurs.

If only it were that simple. Bogusky first told me about his struggle, and his effort to become unstuck, in April, over coffee at a midtown café in New York. It quickly became clear that he was not the same man I had written about more than two years ago, whenFAST COMPANY lionized him on the cover as "the Steve Jobs of the ad world." Back then, he had been as clever, brash, and iconoclastic as the campaigns that earned him a reputation as the most dangerous weapon in advertising. Bogusky relished playing cultural deviant -- whether it was recasting Virgin Atlantic as late-night porn, turning Volkswagen drivers into crash-test dummies, pranking Whopper fans into mass hysteria (or, yes, transforming a human-size chicken into a virtual S&M toy) -- and all the mystique that came along with it. Year after year, while the industry waited for him to stumble, its bad boy continued seducing bigger and more unlikely clients, such as Microsoft and Best Buy, while the cult of Crispin hogged virtually every award from Cannes to the ad trades. Crispin's clients benefitted from his madness: Burger King was a private company when Bogusky first took it on. He pushed the company to roll out the most aggressive fast-food tactics ever seen -- "innovations" such as Chicken Fries (chicken fingers turned into French fries), Meat'normous (with 47 grams of fat, the breakfast sandwich was dubbed "a heart attack on a bun"), and Flame (a flame-broiled-meat cologne) -- and created so much buzz that BK went public in 2006, boosting its annual revenue 25% since then, to $2.5 billion in 2009.

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Yet the Bogusky sitting before me in Manhattan sounded more like some of the activists I'd interviewed in this era of financial and environmental crises. Instead of talking brands, Bogusky riffed on the inequities of Wall Street, the flaws of corporate structure, and the need for social and environmental transparency. He was a man released, trying on the clothes of a new and as yet undefined life. "I've freed myself from Crispin," he exhaled. Who was this person? I wondered. I wasn't the only one asking the question. "I have to go figure out, What the fuck is Alex?" Bogusky spilled, as if I were his therapist. "I don't know."

I asked Bogusky if I could chronicle him on this journey, have in on the enlightenment and the confusion. Given that we live in a world of open confession, and that no one is more in tune with the zeitgeist than Bogusky, I wasn't surprised that he said yes.

And so here I am at this cottage in Boulder, with the most famous man in advertising and Greg the monk. Shuffling around his modest hideout in frayed jeans and flip-flops, Bogusky, who this afternoon resembles an amber-tinted Billy Crudup, tells me, "I wasn't attached to the idea that I was an ad-creative-director rock star. I don't believe any of that stuff. It isn't my legacy. I guess I just don't aspire to corporate legacy. I'm convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that's achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can. The 'you' needs to go away for there to be the real greatness to things. So for me, the genuine part, it's a weird thing -- to get to the real you, you have to be less you."

When Bogusky was 24, his father, Bill, a well-known logo designer in Miami, was hospitalized with a serious depression. Alex had to step in to save his dad's business, which was just one month away from shutting down. He turned it around in a year and a half, handing it back to his dad after he recovered. "Alex was an only child," says Bill, "but I guess we got it right the first time." Alex then ran like hell to get on someone else's payroll. "I hated it, I hated it, I fled from it," says Bogusky. "It was one of the reasons I went to Crispin. I was desperate to be staff."

Maybe. Whatever desire Bogusky had for stability quickly morphed into ambition. Soon after Chuck Porter -- a friend of his dad's -- hired the community-college dropout as senior art director, Bogusky set about turning the sleepy Coconut Grove agency into a fame machine. He understood before most the power of word of mouth, and he was unnaturally talented at manufacturing it. In the late 1980s, he concocted hoaxes like staging a Jim Jones -- style agency suicide and sending photos to the ad trades. "That's the whole philosophy," says Bogusky. "We didn't do anything that wasn't supposed to get press." By the time he was promoted to run Crispin's creative department in 1991, the hunger behind the cool surfer dude was clear. "I stood up and said to everybody, 'We're going to be the most written-about, talked-about agency in the world,' " he says. His first assistant, Ana, recalls, "We sat down one day and I said, 'You should be famous. You're amazing. You're so smart, people need to know what you're thinking and learn from you.' " Ana, now a feisty, petite woman with jet black hair and a Boulder tan, has been wed to Bogusky for 13 years -- sometime after that conversation, they divorced their first spouses and got married. "I started this PR campaign years ago," she laughs. "I didn't think I'd be going along for the ride."

(2) Alex at 12 "I was done developing then. I used to feel bad about it, like people would somehow be able to find out that inside me, there was only a 12-year-old."

Over the past two decades, the ad business has changed utterly, with digital imploding linear 30-second spots, earned media usurping paid media, and consumers co-opting brand conversations. Bogusky's insatiable appetite -- and foresight -- for change kept him ahead and on top. "It was a place where if I got bored, I changed it," says Bogusky. His impatience and impulsiveness led to some of the agency's most prescient moves: approaching media agnostically, bringing anthropologists and sociologists into planning, building an integrated digital department, and growing an industrial-design practice. "We had inculturated [sic] this idea of change, so that if there was something we were famous for in 1998, we didn't want to be famous for it in 1999," says Bogusky.

"He came out of nowhere," says one chief creative officer at a Madison Avenue agency. "His ascent was rapid, stunning. Alex is actually one of the greatest interpretive artists in advertising history. He's a genius at rummaging around in the attic of stuff that exists and asking, How do we interpret it in a modern cultural context so the brand becomes more immediately present in the culture?" Crispin's radical work made it the king of the advertising world, and Bogusky was the wealthy king of Crispin. MDC Partners, which started buying Crispin in 2001 and now owns the whole thing, consists of 30-plus communications agencies -- but an estimated 55% of its profits come from Bogusky's outfit, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Matt Chesler.

Last winter, Bogusky received a payment of just under $15 million from MDC. And he says that when he told MDC chief Miles Nadal that he was leaving Crispin, Nadal dangled another $15 million in front of him. "I like money. I thought, Can I be happy and still get the money?" says Bogusky, who had already received a scheduled payout of around $10 million earlier this year. "But as I looked at what was happening around me, I didn't want to miss out. I wanted to be free to pick and choose to participate in things without conflict, without guilt."

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COMMENTARY:  Excellent interview and look into Alex Bogusky.  It's rare to find people who evaluate what they are doing, question whether it is right, pick principle's over money, and have the courage to change course and fight against the system that they created.  This is quite a story. It is quite refreshing to find these qualities in an advertising iconoclast like Alex Bogusky.  

Courtesy of an article dated August 9, 2010 appearing in Fast Company

MOBILE HOMES & FISHES USES AN OUTDOOR BILLBOARD TO HELP THE HOMELESS, AND A HOMELESS MAN NAMED DANNY SILVER FINDS A HOME

Austin-based nonprofit Mobile Loves & Fishes wanted to raise a more visceral type of awareness about homelessness, and teamed up with marketing agency T3 for a two-day stunt in which an actual homeless man, Danny, slept on a 50-foot billboard where passers-by could text donations to raise money to find a new home for him and his wife. Two days, 252,000 people on Twitter and $12,000 later, Danny was able to find shelter.

More than 3.5 million people in America are homeless, yet too often, they go unseen. Austin-based homeless mission Mobile Loaves and Fishes wanted to change that, to give homeless people a voice with which to say “I am here” and empower others to help.

That’s why, April 27-28, 2010, MLF founder Alan Graham, along with Danny Silver, a then-homeless man, went up on a billboard on I-35. The goal was inspire people to text enough $10 donations to get Danny and his wheelchair-bound wife Maggie off the streets and into a gently used RV (just $12,000).

Not only did we raise enough money to get Danny and Maggie a home, we raised awareness of homelessness to a dramatic new height.

During the time Danny and Alan were on the billboard people, tuned in around the country, with news coverage in 30 markets nationwide. One of those people tuning in was Danny’s daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. She contacted Alan, and they were reunited the same day Danny and Maggie moved into their home.

COMMENTARY:  Thanks to the "I Am Here" outdoor campaign by MLFNow (Mobile Loaves and Fishes) Danny Silver was re-united with his daughter and found a home.  What a great ending.  Thanks MLFNow.org.

Courtesy of an article dated December 13, 2010 appearing in Advertising Age