alexbogusky’s posterous

I’ve told this story several times but I’m not sure the press has ever accurately put it in words so I figured I’d give it a shot. I think all of us go through periods of doubting ourselves and doubting our professional decisions. I’m not sure it ever stops but some periods are more intense than others and it’s a probably a good process for getting a gut check on the path you’re on.

About a year into my first advertising job I was promoted to art director. I worked at a small Miami agency and I was starting to pick up the annuals and trying to understand the business and the craft. In a copy of Adweek I found an ad about a seminar that they were putting on and it looked like a good place to get exposed to some thinking and people I didn’t have access to. So I went to my boss and asked him if he would pay to send me to the seminar. He was an amazing guy and he and I started to talk about it and he asked me what I hoped to get out of it and how much it was and who was going to be there. He seemed really impressed with me and my initiative and he carefully explained to me that the more I learned like this the more valuable I would become and finally he turned to me and said, “Never be afraid to invest in yourself.” Which is beautiful and true advice. So beautiful, in fact, that it wasn’t until several years later that I realized I had gone in there hoping he would pay for my trip and he had artfully told me to pound sand.

But I did pay for it myself and it was a painful amount of money. A very big chunk of my annual salary back then. So imagine my emotional condition as I sat through speaker after speaker who one by one convinced me that there was no place for me in advertising. My head began spinning as I listened with half my brain and tried to make a plan for a new career with the other half. All the speakers seemed to be fabulously successful creative directors. Or maybe that’s just who I bothered to go listen to. I’m not sure if it was the theme of the seminar but each story and each speaker seemed to tell more and more impressive versions of how they would cram great work down their dumbass, ungrateful clients throat. These guys seemed tough and scary and I believed and hung on every word as it poured from the podium. It felt like the ad business was some combination of Mad Men meets Sopranos. Really fun as a TV show but I had no plans to live an actual life like this. So I just sat there with the same thought running through my head on a loop. “I’m out.” “I’m out!”…

I don’t know how long the seminar was. It was probably about two days. If you told me it was a week I’d believe you because it was all happening in slow motion. As I’d walk the halls between session there was this one character that kept catching my eye. He was tall and lanky and was rocking flip flops and long hair. I grew up on the beach too but I was pretending to be a business man so I had a tie on like everybody else and a very attractive leather attache. This guy with the flip flops and the back pack flung over his shoulder didn’t seem to care to pretend about any of it but I had no idea who this freak was.

The last speaker on the docket was a gentleman named Lee Clow and at the beginning of the seminar I was really excited to hear him speak because I recognized his name from the annuals and it was connected to a lot of my favorite things. But by this point in the seminar I was pretty beaten down and didn’t really care to hear any more about how tough and confrontational you had to be to do good work so I took a seat way in the back to make my ultimate escape from his presentation and advertising in general a little easier.

Well when they introduced Lee Clow you can probably imagine how surprised I was to see the freak walk up and take the podium. Now this was getting interesting. Maybe there was hope. This guy wasn’t faking it. He clearly didn’t have time for a lot of the bullshit or the false trappings of business. I have to imagine he had sat through most of the same presentations that I sat through because he seemed to be answering all the tough talk directly. He said he figured his agency had more dead ideas in the trash can than any of the other agencies ever made. That they didn’t make the clients buy the work at all. They didn’t jam anything down anybody’s throat. No, instead they just did the work and showed it to the client. If they didn’t like it they did some more and if they didn’t like that they did some more. Each time they would make it great. They wouldn’t compromise on that but they were confident they could make something new just as brilliant as the last. And they would just go on like that until one of two things happened. The client bought something wonderful or the client got absolutely sick of them and fired them. Wow. Suddenly there was a new path to success. Simple hard work. Now that was something I knew I could do.

So on that day Lee Clow kept me in advertising. I’m so thankful that I had the chance to see through his example I didn’t have to pretend to be anything. I could just be Alex Bogusky. A guy who works in advertising and does the best he can. In spite of the fact that he’s a freak, too.