Welcome to Room 116: Alex Bogusky says…
Alex Bogusky says…

  • To creatives: “This is your company. What are you going to do to make it famous?”
  • On approach: What’s really going on here?” If you can step outside your own culture, you can get an angle on what’s going on inside it.”
  • “We always say, ‘Have faith in the process, even though you have to go through a period where you’re confused,’”
  • “We don’t really believe in advertising”
  • Bogusky uses a visual analogy to describe CP B’s methodology. At the center of his schema is the product destined to become famous, and around that are concentric circles that represent different means of marketing and advertising. The outermost circle–the one that takes the most effort to align with the essential brand message–represents traditional advertising. “We push the marketing toward the product,” Bogusky explains. “We spend all our time in the center: the product.”
  • “The process is finding the questions first and coming up with answers,” says Bogusky. “After you come up with the questions, that leads you to finding the core [strategies].”
  • “With MINI, it’s less about doing an ad and more about making it a part of the culture,” says Bogusky. “If we can come up with a lease that matches the personality of the car, that’s probably better than advertising.”
  • Not from Alex, but still interesting: “[CP B] helped us look at all these consumer touchpoints, [and] mass marketing is just one of them,” Martin says. “The agency doesn’t call their work advertising, they call it creative content. They don’t call it media, they call it creative-content distribution.”

From Creativity, Print, Business 2.0, and Adweek.

Thanks to Brian Chiao for gathering these. This isn’t really supposed to be an all about Crispin Porter + Bogusky site- but, if the idea is to stimulate a discussion between our potential clients and The Next Wave- they need to know what interests us.

We used to require all clients to read “Ogilvy on Advertising” to have a common ground to begin discussing their brand evolution through advertising- now, we hope they read our site.

Is “Product focused Brand culture” the secret of great marketing?

One of the things Chuck Porter shared at a Cincinnati Ad Club meeting is that anyone can do a better price and product ad- just by having a lower price. Seems so obvious- but try telling that to every local car dealer, grocery store or window salesman.

If you think competing on price is a solution- you don’t need better advertising- you need a lobotomy.

Advertising and merchandising as a entertainment? Nothing that hasn’t been talked about before. Tom Peters showcased Stew Leonard’s grocery store in “In search of Excellence” in the early 80’s- the problem was- most in advertising never bothered to read many business books.

So- is Bogusky and company formulating the next eveolution of advertising or not?

What do you think?