Filling in the blanks. Part 1
Robert Safian sent me this story last week as a preview. He wrote that he hoped I found it interesting and fair. It's interesting that "fair" was on his mind. But in the age of social media there is no reason to lobby the publisher for retractions and corrections with the hopes they make them in the next issue, tucked away in some part of the magazine nobody reads. These days you just make the corrections yourself. Most of what I will add is context that either got cut out for the sake of space or to add more drama. I'll just stick my comments in the body of the article in blue italics.
Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World's Hottest Agency to Find His Soul
(This is Bob's favorite trick. Make up a headline that creates context that is completely fabricated from thin air. They did it with the "Can this Dude Make Microsoft Cool?" headline. Even though nobody at CPB ever had as a mission to make Microsoft cool. And as much as they tried to get us to talk about that, we refused. But they made it the story anyway. It's a good trick. In this case I never said I was looking for my soul. My soul is in the pocket of my favorite jeans. What I said I was doing was working to get my genuine voice back. Not as cool as a dude missing his soul I guess.)
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 cherrybrick-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; If only it were that simple. (This just gives me a chuckle. Danielle knows more about life than Mother Teresa. Impressive.)
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, when Fast 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. 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 f laws 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.
(She had to be somewhat surprised. I told her I hadn't enjoyed the last Fast Company article she wrote. We never once talked about making Microsoft "cool" yet that's what they wrote.)
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.”Pretty much.
When Bogusky wa s 24, his father, Bill, a wellknown logo designer
(A graphic designer who did logos. Not a 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.”
(It was a lot of pressure to be an owner of something at 24. At least for me.)
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.
(Sounds good but I didn't have any idea what i was doing. I spent several years learning the difference between advertising and design. "Over-night success" took 20 plus years in my case. But i did have fun along the way.) 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.” (Eventually, it took a while to develop this philosophy. It was tough for a 20 person agency from Miami to get attention back in those days.) 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. (This is true. And it was hard to do. I think we worried that to put your dreams out there you had to very publicly risk failure. The Miami ad scene was small and the statement was beyond audacious. It turned out to be the most important single thing we ever did. Because suddenly the whole agency knew the mission. Before that, we had no mission.)
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.’ ” (She did. It was weird.) Ana, now a feisty, petite woman with jet black hair (Dark brown.) and a Boulder tan, (Not sure what a Boulder tan is. Like a farmer tan with goggle marks i guess.) 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.”
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. (More like curiosity. I just found all this stuff interesting for a long time.)
“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. (Impatient yes, impulsive no. We were barely able to keep the agency up with the changes that were occurring in culture. To go any slower would have been to be too far behind the present day reality.)
“He came out of nowhere,” says one chief creative officer at a Madison Avenue agency. “His ascent was rapid, stunning. (Twenty plus years. It didn't feel all that fast to any of us.)
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.”
(This seems like the real lost opportunity of this article. What's happening in culture and what's happening with me isn't an isolated incident. I meet people every day that are considering radical career changes or have already left their high-paying job to participate in a new way. My story could have served as a metaphor for a new crisis that so many of us are feeling. That was how the story was pitched and i really wish that could have been explored because so many people could have found themselves and their own story in that.)
In 2006, Bogusky moved from Miami to Boulder. Eventually, he uprooted more than half of Crispin to Boulder, which is now home to nearly 600 of the firm’s 1,000 employees. The industry deemed the move west as another sign of Bogusky’s arrogance, another cocky middle finger directed at stodgy Madison Avenue. In retrospect, though, it was the first public sign of Bogusky’s angst. “I never fit in in Miami,” he tells me, popping raw almonds into his mouth like candy. “I didn’t ever feel at home there.” On the other hand, Boulder—think Whole Foods metastasized into an entire town, where Tesla-driving entrepreneurs cut deals over hikes rather than cocktails—seemed a place where he could become his truer self. Says Bogusky, an avid mountain biker and skier, “I know we moved because it matches my values, yet my values moved further because of the move.”
When he settled into Boulder, as if it were the true home he’d never known, Bogusky found many of his life’s goals starting to unwind. Some he describes as superficial: His prized black Viperpowered truck became a guzzly embarrassment, so he sold it; a newfound sense of community began to melt away his suburban aspiration of a walled-off house in a gated enclave. “I literally don’t want a big yard anymore,” says Bogusky, who lives in a shabbychic- decorated Victorian-style house within walking distance of the new cottage. “Your neighbors get closer the smaller your yard is.”
But true internal transformation, he tells me, has been tougher. “There’s that bumper sticker harden the fuck up,” he says. “I want to soften the fuck up.” Bogusky, who always seemed to have gasoline coursing through his veins, was infamously competitive in the advertising world, and he came to it naturally. He raced BMX and motocross bikes from a young age, under the tutelage of his father, who taught him that “part of the joy of winning is the inf liction of loss.” Now, he says, tapping his forearm like a junkie, “I’ve been messing around with this less-competitive version of myself, because the other doesn’t make you happy. You can’t win enough.”
Questioning himself blended with questioning the world at large. The man who built his career pushing sugary sodas for Coca-Cola and greasy pizza for Domino’s now recommends documentaries like The Future of Food (about the perils of genetically modified food) and Food, Inc. (corporate perversion of the food system). He has become a vegetarian. Films like The Corporation (big business is psychopathic) and books like The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy (the danger of shareholder-first economies) have shifted his thinking about capitalism and Wall Street. “It’s a false economy that undoes itself over time,” Bogusky tells me over vegetarian curry at a local Tibetan café. “I think we have to undo it.” Ana articulates her husband’s new passions this way: “I think he sees himself as someone who can change other people’s opinions and help the world.” Of course, this didn’t quite mesh with his day job as cochairman of Crispin. He says he found it difficult to balance his clients’ messaging against his own opinions. In 2008, the man who turned the BK King into a national figure published a book aiming to unravel the supersize trend, The 9-Inch Diet: Exposing the Big Conspiracy in America. Burger King was not amused. “You compromise your voice slowly over time,” Bogusky laughs, “and then you have a moment where you’re like, Wow, that really isn’t what I think.” For him that moment came at a conference late last year, when an audience member asked him about his client, Coke Zero, and the obesity epidemic. “I had some clever capitalist answer,” says Bogusky, who won’t let his children, aged 10 and 13, eat or drink artificial sweeteners. “I heard my mouth disconnected from my soul.” The time had come for him to leave Crispin. And advertising altogether. For now, he’s tiptoeing into the future. “I won’t write down as audacious a goal as I would like, because I’m afraid,” he tells me about this new chapter, which his son and daughter call “Project Dad Gets His Balls Back.” He’s befriending a coterie of business renegades and Boulder entrepreneurs whose ventures seem psychically in line with his new values. One morning, Bogusky meets me for breakfast with Ann Cooper, a chef who mastered new-American cuisine at her restaurants in Telluride and Vermont—or, as she describes her former self, a “white-tablecloth chef feeding rich people their wet dreams.” She left those gigs to radically overhaul the Berkeley, California, school-lunch system, eliminating all trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup in favor of whole grains and salad bars, and is now doing the same for Boulder Valley’s school kids. Bogusky arrives at the hole-inthe- wall diner in cowboy boots, fresh from his mud-encrusted mountain bike. It’s barely 8 a.m., and we’re already talking about dismissing fear in search of a greater purpose. “You sort of get to a certain point in your career and it’s not always about money and it’s not always about the fast lane or the accolades, but about, What are you really doing?” says Cooper, who says she has received “hate mail” from such groups as the Corn Refiners Association and the National Dairy Council. “I think it happens to a lot of people.” (Personal values and profession are best kept in line. I was lucky that for me most of my career this was something i was able to do. It allows you to flow all your energy into a task when there is alignment. But both your professional life and your personal values are built on constantly shifting sands and in my case each one began a journey in opposite directions. This happened slowly but eventually the passion was gone. I had never felt a lack of passion for what I did. I had never felt like staying in bed. And it took a long time for me to understand what the problem really was. I want my kids to see somebody who loves what he does. Not somebody grinding away the hours.) Bogusky has made the FearLess Cottage something of a hub for people he deems, as he has inscribed on the cottage’s keys, “capable of pushing aside fear in pursuit of doing the right thing,” which is to “help define a new era of social responsibility.” During my visit, Bogusky presents keys to the cottage to Cooper and Robyn O’Brien, a former Wall Street analyst who exposed how under-regulated Big Food allowed toxins into the U.S. food supply. The women aren’t completely sure what to do with this access, but they know to be flattered. And they’re not alone. “Alex brings this impish and fun-loving attitude to everything he does,” Hunter Lovins, author of nine books on the environment, later tells me via phone. “Sometime in the next week, I’m going to his cottage to come up with ways to play together.” Bogusky, who often reminds his new peers that he was the brains behind the body-bag anti-smoking “Truth” campaign, is tinkering with the concept of turning FearLess Cottage into a company. If it ever comes into being, it might be part media company (he hosts an hour-long FearLess Web show every week), part brand incubator (he has made small investments in a bourbon company and Justin’s Nut Butter), and part consultancy for executives “trying to mitigate fear.” “If people think I’m fearless, it makes me compassionate for how much fear other people have because I feel scared to death most of the time,” concedes Bogusky. “Inside, I’m like all different levels of scared, jealous, angry, and loving.” During my three days in Boulder, we meet with various startups Bogusky is involved with—all potential disrupters of the status quo. We visit the founder of Green Garage to discuss developing privatelabel products for a new model of sustainable garages to uproot companies like Jiffy Lube. We Skype with Dara O’Rourke, a Berkeley environmental science professor who is trying to transform consumer behavior through GoodGuide, (Check out GoodGuide.com. I have actually decided to serve on their advisory board. This kind of radical transparency and the ability for consumers to search a product life cycle is really exciting for the power it can put into our buying decisions.) his growing database that rates products based on hundreds of environmental and social factors. Down in Denver, we ride Treks from B-Cycle, a bike-sharing system hatched by Crispin. Bogusky revels in the potential of these ideas, especially if pushed by his helping hand. “If GoodGuide doesn’t get it right, I’ll swing my alliance to someone else and work as hard as I can for them. Same goes for B-Cycle,” says Bogusky, relishing his unattachment. True enough. The potential of these ideas is too great to see it unfulfilled. “We need to reinvent the way we get around cities, but if somebody else we haven’t heard of yet does it better, I celebrate that. I just want bike sharing to win.” While we’re riding our Treks, I ask if he ever worries about Crispin’s future without him there. “Well, it’s going to sound bad if I say that I don’t,” he replies nonchalantly. (Some context needed here. I'm responding to whether I worry if CPB will fail without me. And I don't. I'm confident that all the talented people there will carry on. I have planned my departure for years so the pieces were all put in place to make my departure a non event. Part of my ego might wish it was hard but I know CPB better than anybody. And CPB will succeed.) “I don’t need it as a legacy. . . . If Crispin was gone in 10 years, if it was bought or name-changed, that’s fine.” (Separate question about legacy here. I may be wrong but I think the idea if legacy is for fools. We will all be dust. Everything we think we made will be dust.) On my third heady day, I end up on the front porch of his cottage for our final interview. It’s 70 degrees outside, and a breeze brushes by, gently rocking his white porch swing. A gray cat rubs up against a wooden beam. The Rocky Mountains are painted like a mural in the distance. No wonder Bogusky says he never wants to leave Boulder, which the locals affectionately refer to as “25 square miles surrounded by reality.” “So, I have to ask,” I start. “Is there any notion of a midlife crisis in this? You do happen to be 46.” Cradling a cup of chamomile tea, Bogusky releases a quiet laugh. “Yeah, just happen to be,” he smiles. “You know, I’m not completely unaware that that’s what this could be.” He pauses, looking off to the Rockies. “I’m trying to think . . . midlife crises occur generally because we fear death, right? And I’m pretty sure I don’t fear death. So maybe, what do I fear?” He pauses again. “What I fear—actually, I’ll tell you what it is— what I fear is, I fear” his eyes start to pink around the rims, his voice cracks—“I fear a moment when my children are older, and they look at me and say, ‘What did you do? The world is like a spiraling cesspool. You were an adult, you needed to do something, I was just a kid. What did you do?’ I want to be able to say, I did this, this, and this. And did my best. Yeah, that’s it. It is a midlife crisis, and it’s not my death. It’s the fear of not being able to say that you tried, in all sincerity. I think it’s a new kind of midlife crisis.”We’re done.
(This new kind of mid-life crisis might be a big idea. Feels like a book in here. There is something going on for a lot of us, with this feeling that the old institutions are crumbling and a new paradigm is coming to take it's place. We want to participate.)The next morning, Bogusky sends me an email, thanking me for that final question on the porch. “This quote reminded me of why I have to learn to dream bigger,” he writes: “Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning. —M. Gandhi.” “Alex Bogusky is so fictitious. He’s nobody, he’s not there, he doesn’t exist. He’s a big, long list of manipulation and deceit; he doesn’t even know where he went, what happened to him. Now maybe, and I hope this is what’s happening, maybe up there on that hilltop he got his ass kicked by his conscience, his collective consciousness has him on the ground strangling.” (Wow. It doesn't feel quite that bad. Although I like the bit about not knowing who I am and not existing.) I’m back in New York, doing follow-up interviews by phone, and a former Crispin senior creative has been ranting for more than two hours about the “phony life wrecker” he used to work for. As I continue calling around, it becomes apparent that all those hours of candid, “fearless” reckoning I shared with Bogusky may not have been quite as fearless or as candid as I thought. There were a few things, it seems, that Bogusky neglected to mention. He didn’t bring up, for example, the mind games he has played with employees and colleagues. “He liked anything that gave him ideas for how to control or dominate people,” says a colleague who worked with Bogusky more than five years ago. “He used to pride himself on reading books on war and combat; he loves that shit.” Says a former colleague who still considers Bogusky a friend, (I'm really not sure about what books these are. I read Art of War. It's full of good practical advice isf you are a sixth century general. And I have read a lot of history books. But not so much on war. I do like to play paintball!) “He’s a manipulator, a master manipulator. He’s good at putting on the shtick. No one knows if it’s manufactured or not.” In the words of one award-winning chief creative officer who has served on industry-awardshow juries with Bogusky: “He is a master of disguise, in a way. ‘Aw, shucks, little old me.’ It’s cute Alex, it’s charming, but it’s a disguise. The way he managed that room would have made Machiavelli proud. He’s a master at nonverbal communication. He doesn’t go straight at it, he does little tiny things designed to make you feel slightly selfconscious, uncomfortable, off balance, and then he can sort of bring you along in the direction he wants to bring you.” (This would be impressive but it doesn't sound like me. I'm much more direct and attack problems without much subtlety.)
(This new kind of mid-life crisis might be a big idea. Feels like a book in here. There is something going on for a lot of us, with this feeling that the old institutions are crumbling and a new paradigm is coming to take it's place. We want to participate.)The next morning, Bogusky sends me an email, thanking me for that final question on the porch. “This quote reminded me of why I have to learn to dream bigger,” he writes: “Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning. —M. Gandhi.” “Alex Bogusky is so fictitious. He’s nobody, he’s not there, he doesn’t exist. He’s a big, long list of manipulation and deceit; he doesn’t even know where he went, what happened to him. Now maybe, and I hope this is what’s happening, maybe up there on that hilltop he got his ass kicked by his conscience, his collective consciousness has him on the ground strangling.” (Wow. It doesn't feel quite that bad. Although I like the bit about not knowing who I am and not existing.) I’m back in New York, doing follow-up interviews by phone, and a former Crispin senior creative has been ranting for more than two hours about the “phony life wrecker” he used to work for. As I continue calling around, it becomes apparent that all those hours of candid, “fearless” reckoning I shared with Bogusky may not have been quite as fearless or as candid as I thought. There were a few things, it seems, that Bogusky neglected to mention. He didn’t bring up, for example, the mind games he has played with employees and colleagues. “He liked anything that gave him ideas for how to control or dominate people,” says a colleague who worked with Bogusky more than five years ago. “He used to pride himself on reading books on war and combat; he loves that shit.” Says a former colleague who still considers Bogusky a friend, (I'm really not sure about what books these are. I read Art of War. It's full of good practical advice isf you are a sixth century general. And I have read a lot of history books. But not so much on war. I do like to play paintball!) “He’s a manipulator, a master manipulator. He’s good at putting on the shtick. No one knows if it’s manufactured or not.” In the words of one award-winning chief creative officer who has served on industry-awardshow juries with Bogusky: “He is a master of disguise, in a way. ‘Aw, shucks, little old me.’ It’s cute Alex, it’s charming, but it’s a disguise. The way he managed that room would have made Machiavelli proud. He’s a master at nonverbal communication. He doesn’t go straight at it, he does little tiny things designed to make you feel slightly selfconscious, uncomfortable, off balance, and then he can sort of bring you along in the direction he wants to bring you.” (This would be impressive but it doesn't sound like me. I'm much more direct and attack problems without much subtlety.)
Continued:
