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

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