alexbogusky’s posterous

Sending thanks to as many of the folks who have praised, pissed on, loved, lambasted our little book as possibel. It all is truly appreciated. And when I say "little" it's not merely to be self effacing. It's also to be accurate. It is little and it's diminutive size is on purpose. But not to make it easy to carry. That is merely a byproduct.

Whenever I sat down to a business book I've almost always had the same critique, "It would have made a nice pamphlet." This really wasn't a slam because many of these books were favorites and became an important part of how I looked at business moving forward. It's just that these books all had a great idea and they did a terrific job getting it across but then they just kept repeating the same concept.

So I considered, as my writing partner can attest, to actually creating a marketing pamphlet. But pamphlet just has no ring to it. Maybe a zine? Nah, too nineties. And book publishers prefer to publish books. So it's a tiny book. And only a tiny bit more redundant than had it been a pamphlet.

I pasted in all the reviews I'm aware of. Thanks again.

http://garethkay.typepad.com/brand_new/2009/10/i-was-meant-to-be-moderating-a-panel-in-new-york-last-night--on-creating-digital-culture-but-sadly-due-to-a-new-busin.html

http://www.psfk.com/2009/09/baked-in-book-launch.html

http://www.constructivegrumpiness.com/home/2009/10/1/baked-in-book-review.html

http://great-ads.blogspot.com/2009/09/baked-in-by-alex-bogusky-john-winsor.html

http://thedenveregotist.com/article/5114/bogusky-winsor-cook-up-baked-in

http://blog.adhack.com/tag/crispin-porter-bogusky/

http://www.futurelab.net/blogs/marketing-strategy-innovation/2009/09/baked_wikiblog.html

http://www.psfk.com/2009/10/book-review-baked-in-creating-products-and-businesses-that-market-themselves.html

http://paulmiser.com/are-you-half-baked-or-baked-in/

http://ow.ly/sOSB

http://www.theultimateaccountguy.com/2009/10/baked-in-follows-its-own-advice.html

http://www.socialfish.org/2009/10/book-review-baked-in.html

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-neil3-2009nov03,0,203406.column

http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/article/2405/thoughts-on--baked-in---a-book-by-bogusky-and-winsor.html

http://www.whoamitosay.com/2009/10/bakedin-a-book-that-is-more-th.html

http://www.core77.com/blog/book_reviews/bakedin_creating_products_and_businesses_that_market_themselves_by_alex_bogusky_john_winsor_reviewed_by_ed_reilly_14892.asp

http://anidea.com/etc/book-review-bogusky-on-baking/

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3ia59bfc00cf09b10b5fc267099d552090

I was just so excited to have a review in LA Times that the fact that it was harsh didn’t really hurt my feelings much. To survive 20+ years in the advertising industry, my feelings dried up and blew away long ago. I do miss them. But without feelings in the way it was easy to appreciate how lucky I was to even get reviewed. Dan Neil isn’t the normal book reviewer or even advertising columnist but is instead the automotive columnist so he probably had to get special permission to review the book. But who knows. We were tough on the automotive industry in the book so perhaps that was the reason for the special assignment.

Ernest Lupinacci a founder of Anomaly and really brilliant creative wrote a rebuttal to the LAT letters section and he copied me. At this point it seems they have chosen not to run it so it’s social media to the rescue. Sometimes Ernest is so smart I have no idea what he’s saying. But he clearly still has feelings which is a beautiful thing. I’ve pasted it below.

Regarding Dan Neil's article "Ad guys' book is self-centered, half-baked" (Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2009), Mr. Neil implies that "perhaps Bogusky and Windsor never had an editor to challenge them on some of their most evident holes in their book." 

Having read Mr. Neil's column, I can't help but infer that he likewise operates untethered by any editorial guidance. And so, as he so magnanimously challenged Bogusky and Windsor on their collective point of view, I will now graciously attempt to challenge his. 

Granted, his assertion that "better products tend to sell better" would seem self-evident, but the real issue is what actually constitutes "better"? In the case of the stripped-down, web-friendly Flip video camera, that "better product" is exactly the sort of "better" product a legacy brand like Sony was incapable of designing - because Sony believes that they have the patent on making and marketing a "better" product. So suffice it to say, not all "better" products are created equal. 

The author's critique that consumers' would be ill-advised to design their own running shoes as they  "draw on esoteric fields of biomechanics and material science" is literally the very definition of "sophomoric." If Mr. Neil was even remotely aware of the realities of pre-fabrication and mass-customization, he might have noticed that it is possible for the average person to design their own home without holding a degree in architecture or engineering - since they are ultimately spec'ing the finished product by choosing from a set of pre-existing components. 

Of course, both of these points barely begin to approach Neil's egregious definition of marketing as merely the means to "...minimize the downside." 

Huh? 

I wonder if he were asked to define the purpose of the newspaper industry, if Mr. Neil wouldn't reply "What is journalism for if not to provide a place to run full-page newspaper ads in?" Marketing, Mr. Neil, is a means by which products and brands seek to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by contextualizing their quantitative and qualitative benefits. I'll attempt to show you what I mean using an example you might relate to: The New York Times' slogan is "All The News That's Fit To Print" - and whether that thought resonates with you or not,  I'm sure you'd agree that what "The Grey Lady" is attempting to communicate is that the quality of its product is superior, substantial, and thereby meaningful to the consumer. (Or perhaps, you would contend that the statement is somehow meant to "minimize the downside" of the reality that the Times is printed on paper that requires trees to be cut down?)

Lastly, Mr. Neil's very own estimation of what defines arrogance and naivete ironically and exquisitely exposes his own propensity to be arrogant and naive. I almost didn't believe my eyes when I read the sentence "It's far easier to craft marketing to fit the product than to craft product to fit somebody's idea of good marketing." Yes, of course it is far easier, but not necessarily smarter, or beneficial, or profitable. Don't take my word for it, just ask the city of Detroit. For decades it was in fact far easier to merely "craft marketing" that sought to sell poorly-designed, poorly-conceived automobiles to the consumer. And so, instead of doing what was necessary - spend money on retooling, and seeking new suppliers, and finding the money to "break open new paradigms" - the US Auto Manufacturers apparently followed your sage advice; they dug in their heels, held their breath, and arrogantly and naively watched an entire industry implode. 

Ernest Lupinacci

             

Click here to download:

Shocking_Barack._What_just_hap.zip (3361 KB)

As the saying goes necessity is the mother of invention. And as is often the case, the necessity was once again a lack of sufficient funds to do the job in the traditional way. Originally the idea of riding a bike in stages across the country to the President was a plan to launch BCycle. But Brammo came up to bat first and it was adjusted to work. The first and most major adjustment was that the ride would retrace the path the auto CEOs took in their private planes to ask for bailout money. We figured a trip that cost them about 60,000 in travel would cost us less than five bucks in electricity. We came in a hair under budget. And instead of asking for something, we thought we could give the Pres something. Something fun that was a US born solution that had already made it out of the concept stage and was actually for sale at Best Buy.

So who would make the ride? We worried that it might be too weird to put the advertising guy on one of the Powercycles. And if we did how would we explain it? In the end, we decided in the world of real-time content creation it was important to have the director actually star in the production. Dave was as passionate about the product as anybody and, although he didn’t know as much as Brian, he is a natural communicator. We would need that, especially with the newness of the event. He and Brian would make the perfect pair. And the easiest way to describe who Dave was turned out to be to just be completely transparent. He’s the ad guy.

It would be a buddy story. A buddy story of the inventor and the ad guy.

The stage would be the blue highways and the American towns between Detroit and DC; the players would be the engineer and the ad guy and the people they met along the way. To capture the whole thing would mean a chase-vehicle filled with Steve, the camera man, Madison, the producer, Mike, the editor and Dave’s partner, Burnie. They would Motel and couch surf their way across the countryside tweeting and shooting and editing non-stop for two weeks. It would be done on half a shoestring and in the end, we would have…?

That’s the thing about this that’s so fundamentally different than anything that has even a tiny media buy connected. With media you know you’ll get something but here, there is a very real chance that absolutely nothing happens. Yet we were also confident that what we were doing mattered and that, maybe when something matters, it has a chance to get noticed. But to be honest, there wasn’t a lot of time to think about that because it was a mad dash to get it done before the weather turned to shit. I’ve ridden in bad weather and I really didn’t want to subject these guys or the bikes to that. It turned out that we were able to get our ducks in a row and our boys on the road just at the exact time the weather went to total shit. Cold and rain were the constant. How cold and how much rain were the variables for 90 percent of the trip.

The effort started humbly and quietly but steadily picked up momentum and followers. Balloon Boy didn’t help but that blew over and soon, we could see a steady increase in interest. People began working in front of the scenes and behind the scenes to help. From places to stay to places to charge to political connections. The campaign was being fueled not by money, but by personal passions and a genuine interest to help. Social media launched the event into the traditional media who picked up the story in innumerable towns along the way and in places like The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. At the beginning of this bizarre odyssey, I would have said they had a one in ten thousand chance of getting an audience with the President. By the end, it was feeling somewhere between one in ten and fifty/fifty. To get Craig a meeting in the Whitehouse with Secretary Chu and other energy leaders is an incredible feeling. And maybe the most fitting ending. We did make one last ditch effort and I hear the bike is gone. So maybe we will still see Obama rocking and rolling on electric power on his next visit to the Capital building.

Looking back on Shocking Barack, it’s difficult to not feel like something happened. And we find ourselves standing around asking each other the same question that you ask when you witness something out of the ordinary; “What just happened?” And we get the feeling we just had a glimpse into some of what our lives might be like in the next five years. A glimpse at a new kind of real-time interactive campaign where you are forced to participate if you expect others to participate. A glimpse at a new set of skills that will be required of creative people and production people. A glimpse at a new kind of relationship between brand, product, and marketer. A glimpse at how the term “ad guy” becomes less like “used car salesman” and more like “buddy.”

Thanks Dave. We may owe you one.

Shockingbarack.com

Let me start out by saying that I loved being a creative director. On most days I probably felt like I had the best job in the world. I start out by saying this because I imagine a lot of what I write will seem to the reader like I’m describing a negative situation or a hardship. And I guess for most people insanity probably would be a hardship, but we creative director types are not normal. Not even a little. You might even hold the illusion that you are normal. I know I do. Yet even though for I have described myself as very, very, normal person for years and years, I have not been able to generate much agreement in this area.

To be a creative director is to be paid to be insane. A sort of professional Schizophrenia. And there is a huge distinction between professional insanity and amateur insanity. The former pays much better than the latter but there are other distinctions too. Otherwise you could just scour the sanitariums of the land to find creative directors. Which contrary to what most account people might think, won’t actually work. The difference between the pro and the amateur is the ability to turn it off and on. I guess mostly to turn it off. It gets turned on pretty much automatically.

Usually by other people. Who need you to think about their ideas. And there are a lot of these people. They’re mostly but not exclusively called art directors and copywriters.  They have so many ideas and they like them all. And their ideas fill your head. They insist on it. If you’re really busy and there are a lot of assignments flowing through the shop, it seems like you can go a week without having any thoughts of your own. It’s not that you don’t think. You think all the time. But you think about thoughts that weren’t born in your head. Strange and wonderful thoughts that your brain may not even be capable of having are cohabitating with hundreds of other thoughts that might all be in direct contrast to each other. Fighting in your head with your own damn thoughts taking both sides.

Now if you had a lot of time to do this thinking it may not be so much like insanity. It might be described with lofty terms like philosophy. And I do believe all good marketing and branding is essentially philosophy. Create a philosophy and express it. But it’s definitely philosophy light. And the thought process is more similar to schizophrenia. With each thought never in your head for more than 15 minutes and with each thought carrying the exact same amount of importance.

You’re not supposed to have your own thoughts. You learn to discount your own thoughts. It’s not fair to the people who work for you. You don’t want to compete with your art directors and writers. You want to build their ideas. So if you do have an original thought (and it does happen) you better to give it to somebody else so they can warp it and give it back to you.

Now I haven’t described anything any decent psychotic can’t do. But here comes the professional part. You take all these voices and find a compress them all into one. Some have to go away some have to combine and other have to wait until later.

Oh, and when it's all done you just have to present all this insanity to the client like it is the sanest idea anybody has ever had.

This just freaks me out so I pulled the story straight off the site. (The shockingbarack.com site)

By now everyone knows the internet has exploded the traditional news model.
And it’s mind-boggling to see how fast one net-savvy person can generate a story. While other reporters scrawled on pads of paper and snapped still photos, Adrian Telegram reporter Erik Gable stood to the side with a camera phone and a tiny digital audio recorder. MINUTES later, he generated a comprehensive article on the Telegram website. We weren’t even saddled up when the local story hit. http://bit.ly/1sAjVa Amazing.

ShockingBarack.com is a labor of love. Hopefully all of your labors in life are filled with love although sometimes they’re filled with money, too. But Brammo is still a very small company and their advertising budget is essentially zero. What they offer instead is brilliant minds and progressive thinking that’s just amazing to be around and that’s worth a lot.

About three weeks ago, Dave Schiff and his partner Alex Burnard came in and told me they thought we should give a Brammo to the President because he needed to know that America's most energy efficient vehicle was being made in Oregon by a scrappy bunch of electric vehicle visionaries. I bounced the idea off of Craig at Brammo who loved it and suggested we retrace the path that the American car company CEOs took when they recently visited DC. This was exciting because now I had the chance to break the news to Dave that he would be putting his money where his mouth was and so he’d be making the journey with Brian, the head designer from Brammo. If you look at the site Dave is the guy in the impossibly dorky brown helmet. He actually rides to work in that helmet most days.

With a budget of zero we knew the only way to make the journey would be to rely on the kindness of Americans along the way to get us there. So the guys will be using couchsurfing.com to recharge their bodies at night and asking for donations of electricity to charge up their bikes. (Each charge is about 35 cents so we’ll actually pay folks if we don’t have donors ready at a given stop.)

We’ll also be looking for help in meeting President Obama. We figure somebody must know him or know somebody who knows him so we can schedule a good time to present him with the Brammo. We don’t want to surprise him since that kind of thing probably gets you face down and spread eagle with a secret service agent kneeling on your back. But we want to shock him with the fact that without any bailout money these enterprising and innovative dudes at Brammo have a homegrown solution to our country’s transportation crisis. And it’s not theory. It’s for sale.

The guys leave in a couple of days from Detroit, and they’ll be shooting video along the way to post each night. They’ll be tweeting and blogging from the road. Although I think a lot of what happens is going to be weird and hilarious, I can’t help but be very curious if there is a possibility that social media can actually get these guys and this company an audience at the White House. There is no doubt social media is helping a new breed of politician get elected, but does it go the other way when we need their attention? We shall see.

www.shockingbarack.com

Tweet them @shockingbarack

THIS IS AN EDITORIAL PIECE I DID A FEW YEARS AGO FOR ONE OF THE TRADE PUBS. I TWEAKED IT A BIT HERE AND THERE.  

I was recently reminded of my first Adweek seminar more than 18 years ago. It was there that I first discovered something astounding. I found out that I worked in a service industry.

What a freaking bummer.

Over the next 18 years, I on a personal level and we as an agency dismissed the notion that we were part of the service industry and began to build our model and our philosophies around the idea that we were in manufacturing instead. A philosophy that suggested that our ultimate job was to produce great marketing products. Notice I say ultimate job, because along the way there are certainly elements of service to what we do.

And I’m not the kind of revolutionary who wants to do away with account service people. Without our brilliant account people there is only chaos. And many of the best ad people I know work in that department. And at CP+B we all, account people included, happen to believe that if it’s possible to succeed at the service yet ultimately fail to deliver the marketing that can do the job. If this is true, then we can’t be in the service industry. Great account people, media people, planners and production people deserve and take as much ownership of the marketing product as any person in the creative department does.   

At a more recent seminar somebody at Adweek had somehow decided that I deserved an award for innovation. Well, as usual, I had won an award for something that I didn’t really see myself as an expert in. So, the first thing I did was to look up the definition of innovation.

         Def. The act of introducing something new.

The word “new” exploded off the page for me. Because new is not something you want or expect from a member of the service industry. What you want from your travel agent is to have him or her book the destination you want and the hotels you want and that’s it.

Don’t screw it up.

For years, because we were able to just push our message on a consumer that had few options and even less control, we got by with this erroneous idea that we were in the service industry. It wasn’t important to create new and innovative products if you could simply force people to see them.

So if you agreed that the products really didn’t matter then what did?

Service. A good meeting. A good golf game. A nice limo and dinner.

What is good work is debatable. But the process for making something new and innovative is not. It is done by people who are smart, passionate and educated in their field. They work long enough and hard enough to find a path that is new and fresh.

It is not done by giving up in the name of good service.
“Hey, it’s not going to work but we did a good job because this is what our client wanted.” Bullshit. Our clients want brilliant marketing. And by surrendering our expertise over the years the industry created an advertising culture that doesn’t know how to operate when the end goal is to make something new.

Well, we’re in a bit of a pickle now. Because the product matters more than ever, and believe it or not, it will probably become even more important in the future.

This isn’t about creative. This is about every aspect of what we do. It’s about creating an industry culture that is capable of introducing new ideas into the marketplace. 

So if we aren’t in the service industry (because we can’t be if we expect to succeed), then which industry are we in?

The Manufacturing Industry?

Although pretending to be in manufacturing here at CP&B was a handy exercise for us to change our own behavior, that can’t really be it. Too much, in fact, pretty much all of what we do is custom made. We don’t have assembly lines. And we aren’t expected to do something new and different every few years. We are expected to do it every day on every project that goes out the door. We create thousands of new products a year. We attempt to tap into and perhaps even change pop culture hundreds of times a year. And we create and stimulate and maintain dozens of brands a year. Still every day that goes by I’m happier that the manufacturing model has been our focus. Today so much of what we do is a more literal translation of factory. We build sites and apps and e-commerce and bike kiosks and rental platforms, etc, etc.

Unless you’ve been living under a copy of Ogilvy on Advertising lately you’ve noticed with a combination of curiosity, and perhaps dread, that every day what we do becomes more like the movie and television business. For some of you the lines may have blurred between what you do and the publishing business. And if you are on the cutting edge you find yourself spending time harnessing games, industrial design, architecture and interactive apps to help build our clients’ businesses.

It’s no coincidence that we find ourselves spending more and more time in these disciplines. These are our sister professions. All of us sharing a common industry. Advertising, movies, music, television, publishing, architecture, industrial design and graphic design.

We are all part of the Creation Industries. And it really isn’t limited to the list of industries above. The above do it full time but no matter what business you’re in today, you’re being expected to create a way of doing business that your consumers build them into their lives.

The market forces created by the rapid demise of mass media and traditional media models have made the real business we’re in clearer than ever. We’re in the business of leading our clients in creating new ideas and even mediums so compelling and entertaining that the consumer searches them out. These ideas can’t be familiar. These ideas won’t be comfortable. These ideas won’t be obvious. And they probably wont feel or look much like advertising.

Brilliance will be more powerful than ever, and yet everything from above average on down will become invisible. Produce ordinary ideas and nobody will even see them. Great clients will expect from great marketing partners the same things we all expect from the other creation industries: Create something so funny, charming, or useful that I don’t want to live without it. So more and more we will find ourselves working with and without question competing with our sister creation professions to introduce ideas new enough to grab even a few moments of our audiences finite attention. And only the very best will be rewarded.

It’s actually quaint to merely think about brands or marketing today. The marketing and the product are colliding and pretty much every web2.0 offer illustrates this. The media is the message has gone into a digital blender and come out: The media, the company and the community are the message.

The service model worked when basically anything we did created awareness because mass media was able to deliver huge audiences. And so wine cellars, golf club memberships and nights out on the town were the differentiators between good and mediocre agencies.

 Good news for the next generation of disrupters. That golf stuff won’t cut it anymore.

My son was inspired by the previous robot ad executives post to create this new image.