_{ALEX BOGUSKY'S}
REMORA ON THE UNDER-BELLY OF CAPITALISM

Alex Bogusky was creative director of advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. He has been named Creative Director of the Decade, inaugurated into the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Achievement and received an honorary PhD from the University of Colorado. In 2010 he retired from advertising in order to aid the “new consumer revolution” from his base, the FearLess Cottage.

THE BACKGROUND OF BOGUSKY.

“I grew up in a family of graphic designers. I didn’t go to college and I didn’t have any particular drive except that I tried to become a professional motocrosser for a while. And when that fell through I settled back into graphics because that was all I knew.

“And through graphics I accidentally wound up working in an advertising agency. I had never really considered advertising or thought about it, but there I was. The agency wasn’t very good so I still didn’t think that the industry was all that great either.

“I remember that one of the art directors had a bunch of annuals. I was used to design annuals because that was the world I came from, but I’d never seen a One Show or anything like that. So I started looking at that work and I realized that there are people who are really good at this, and the way they do it is really fun, really creative, and I wanted to do that.

“So I started messing around on my own, trying out that kind of advertising, and it wasn’t well received at the agency. Luckily, I’d known Chuck Porter for a while. He was working as a copywriter and he eventually hired me, thinking that what I was doing was pretty cool.”

RESPECT THE PEOPLE, NOT THE FORM.

“I once told a reporter that I had no respect for advertising, and his face fell. He was really upset by those words. I realized that the way he took it was different to how I had meant it. I have respect for the people and I have respect for what’s been done, I just didn’t think the form was about respect. I thought it was much more about recreating and reinventing.

“For me, you can be frozen if you idolize something. You can have so much respect for the work that has been done before that it’s impossible to take the form forwards. I had to not respect it in order to move it.

“And of course, there’s a lot that’s awful, but it can be awful in different ways. It can be awful in ways that are benign, but it can also be awful in ways that are really malevolent.

“I think that if you’re mindful and you work in the business you’re just worried about what it is you do. There’s the fact that sometimes you can hurt people and ideas and culture, and that’s balanced by the fact that you really get off on manipulating culture. There’s this high you get, similar to the rush a musician or a celebrity gets from playing within pop culture. You get that same high from behind the scenes.”

HOW TO SLEEP AT NIGHT.

“The question of ethics in advertising is huge.

“I think that there are broader, more accepted cultural ethics, and advertising as an industry generally plays within the boundaries of those. You don’t see it move outside of this ethical system, and that’s why it’s an accepted cultural form.

“But then there are also people’s individual ethics and morals. As you work in the business, those ethics and morals may come into conflict with things that you are asked to do. At that point you can take one of two positions. Some people ignore their own personal ethics. They think: ‘I don’t have the power to say no to this, this is my job.’ I hear that stance a lot.

“Other people speak up. Probably they sometimes get fired, but at other times they get heard.

“I never had a problem with people saying: ‘I won’t work on this.’ There’s always lots of other stuff to work on. I have good friends who wouldn’t work on alcohol, and that was fine. And I’ve had Mormons who won’t drink alcohol, but will work on alcohol. Also fine. Those are personal ethical questions.”

SEX AND ADVERTISING.

“Is advertising inherently unethical? Or when does it become unethical? It’s like asking: is sex unethical?

“It’s not. It depends on how you treat it.

“And advertising, in its purest form, is getting attention. Is it unethical to get attention for something? No.

“I think we can probably all agree on that. Is it unethical to get attention for some things? Probably.

“I do think that our larger cultural morals and values could be equated to the seven deadly sins. I’m not a Bible-thumping evangelist, but if you look at where those sins come from, they’re probably guides for society as well as religion. They were probably guidelines for happiness.

“And advertising generally works against those guidelines. Lust, envy, gluttony and the rest can all be seen in advertising’s mainstream – you can identify those ideas through the majority of work. So just by having messages present that promote these things would be for some, I would say, an unethical use of advertising.

“In the business we call it ‘aspiration.’ It’s the basest form of advertising, the one that the bigger clients usually want to push you into. ‘Aspiration’ is a more palatable word for promoting lust, gluttony, greed, envy, pride. So when you stoke the fires of those things in a culture, it’s not something that feels good.

“There are ways not to do it. I mean, you can definitely use advertising in ways that are more honest, and humorous and insightful. You can make advertising that allows and encourages a totally different kind of behaviour. You can encourage sharing. You can encourage friendliness. You can encourage all sorts of stuff, but instead ‘aspiration’ seems to be the default setting for your average advertising out there.”

POSITIVE ADVERTISING IN PRACTICE.

“I found that you don’t have to use this default set of values we call ‘aspiration.’ The place where I had the most success in putting other ideals into the work was when we introduced Mini Cooper. We did a lot of work about being good to each other on the road. We included messages on road rage, waving to other Mini drivers and helping each other. It was this idea of there being a higher calling for driving, and it worked like crazy. We never did any work that said ‘This other guy got the Mini, and you didn’t’ which is the default message for a lot of automotive advertising, and a lot of beer advertising too.

“For me, it was always fun to find ways of weaving these messages into the work that we were doing. The way I looked at it is: you have millions of dollars funding this loudspeaker that can shout into culture. Yeah, you were charged with selling this product. But what else was going to be in that communication? It could be anything. So it was always fun and a bit of a puzzle to try to inject something that we felt could be good for people to hear.

“When we launched Microsoft the campaign was based on connection, and the fact that that we’re all connected. I got Deepak Chopra in the spots and I’d written his script: this is Deepak and this is what I think he’s going to say. We got a response, which was: ‘Deepak wants to do it but he wants to write his own thing,’ and people were worried I’d be offended. And I’m like ‘Whatever. Trust me, whatever he writes is going to be perfect.’ And it was.

“Generally, though, I was never very successful at getting other people to like this game of using advertising as a vehicle for bigger values. One reason was that many people I worked with just weren’t into it. Perhaps they were just too worried about getting the work done, period. They didn’t have time or energy to inject that kind of thinking into whatever campaign we were producing. But that’s okay. You can’t really expect advertising to be an especially enlightened industry within an unenlightened society.

“Advertising is definitely a reflection of society. Ultimately, you’re nothing more than a list of your clients. You’d like to be more, but the company you keep defines you. I describe advertising as a remora, a sucker fish, on the underbelly of capitalism. It’s a parasitic relationship we have with the system as a whole. I think you could remove advertising and the foundation of capitalism would not crumble.”

MAKE A LIST.

“I don’t know if it matters in what way you look outside advertising, but it is important to do so. It’s also good to look into the ways in which what we do is criticized. It’s easy to close yourself off to the criticism but I try to be pretty open to it. We would have a lot of conversations in the agency where we reflected on what we were doing, asking ‘Is this right? Is this wrong?’

“Having said that, when you’re in the middle of a situation, a certain amount of your decisions are simply rationalizations. I think that’s just very difficult to avoid. So you just have to be diligent, and critical.

“We were having these conversations my whole career. So, early on, I made a list. I encourage people to do this: if you go into advertising, have a list of what you will and won’t work on. When I started, the biggest topic was: would you work on tobacco?

“And I honestly would have worked on tobacco. I was pretty laissez-faire, but I was totally unaware of what had gone on in that industry. Once I knew, I could never work on it.

“I added another category that I would never work on, which is advertising to children. Through our work on ‘The Truth’ anti-tobacco campaign, we learned a lot about tobacco tactics and targeting kids. But we also learned a lot about how a child’s brain develops, and in my opinion it’s unethical to advertise to children from an adult point of view and with an adult voice, with all these sophisticated tools we have.

“I couldn’t do kids advertising once I realized that kids literally haven’t developed part of their brain, the part that allows them to see messages as not absolutes. So they really see things in very black and white terms. Whether you’re a toy manufacturer, or you make cereals, or whatever, I wouldn’t promote your product.

“So that was another category added to my list. Then there was pharmaceuticals. I felt I didn’t know enough about how they worked and their side effects to be comfortable working in that area.

“You develop this over your career, and I think everyone should constantly be examining what they will and won’t work on.

“Ask yourself: what kind of communication do you feel okay about? Do you feel okay about sharing what this product does? Do you feel okay suggesting to people that if they don’t buy this product then they’re not cool?”

THE BURGER DILEMMA.

“We asked ourselves these questions when we were working on Burger King. Is it ethical to advertise fast food? Is that something that you feel comfortable with? At the time, I absolutely did. I grew up on fast food, almost exclusively. To me it was an issue of portion control, and not the food itself.

“Today, I would be in a slightly different position because the industrialized food supply has changed what a burger is. It’s not the same food I was eating as a kid. I was unaware of this, so I continued working on Burger King, but as I became aware of the processes behind fast food, it started to become a problem for me.

“I think that the more you know, the more you realize that you don’t have the whole world to choose from. But that isn’t bad. Anybody in advertising or business knows that focusing is the greatest asset you can have. If you can focus your attention and your talents, you can achieve far more. So the fact that there are categories beyond where you’re willing to go is fine. I had more categories outside of what I was willing to work on than most. There would be all sorts of stuff that we’d be asked to pitch on, and I would say, ‘No, we don’t do that.’ It didn’t hamper me. There’s plenty out there.”

IS ADVERTISING IMPROVING?

“It has the opportunity to get better. I grew up with the notion of parity product marketing, meaning two products that are essentially identical competing against each other – the most famous example being Coke and Pepsi. Back then, the marketer’s job was to come up with a story, a reason that made one product seem more appealing than the other. Really this came down to: which product’s lie is better? Or which product’s lie is more romantic?

“I think this façade of a romantic lie existed on most brands. But these façades are going to have to be replaced. The story is going to be replaced by real-time facts. It’s going to happen gradually, but it’s going to happen through social media and other tools that people use to access brands.

“Successful brands are beginning to shift from the notion of a story, to working on delivering real-time understanding of them as a company to consumers. And whoever does that fast gets the biggest brand bump. I think that’s a huge and fundamental shift.

“Over the next few years we’ll see both versions of branding occurring. There’s a lot of old-school branding still going on, and then there’s the beginnings of a new and very progressive understanding of branding, based around transparency – if you want to use that term.

“Some of the tools are already there for consumers to be empowered in this way. Some are being created by the brands themselves, and more will come online. This movement isn’t exclusive to social media either, unless you include services like WikiLeaks in social media.

“We’re seeing the gradual removal of an asymmetry of information that exists in the current state. At the moment, the company has always known more than the consumer. Within companies they have lots of discussions about what consumers can and can’t know. This isn’t sinister, by the way. It’s more about asking, ‘Well, what would be good for consumers to know?’

“That asymmetry is declining because all the information is going to be out there, and everyone will have immediate access to it. Actually, you could viably suggest that the information is already there. The only thing that’s missing is more tools with which to access it.

“What I don’t know is whether consumers are going to be as involved in this process as they should be in order to have that asymmetry of information disappear in each and every interaction. But it probably doesn’t matter because in the aggregate there will be enough consumers that will want it to disappear, enough so that they actually create information equality for the rest.”

COMMON.

“I’m troubled by the systemic problems that exist in capitalism now. A lot of people are nostalgic about a time when the government had a stronger role in controlling corporations, but that time is very much gone. Corporations are firmly in control.

“However, I don’t think they’re sinister. I’ve met very few evil capitalists. Mostly, they’re just really good people. But the system creates a kind of behaviour that will be really damaging for society if left unchanged. I think we’re beginning to see that already. There’s plenty of proof everywhere.

“Some would look to government to create guidelines, new forms of regulation. I’m sceptical as to whether that’s possible given our political system and how much corporate involvement there is in it, via donations, lobbyists, etcetera.

“There are four lobbyists for each member of Congress, and that’s just for oil and coal. When you pit that kind of power against my measly vote, my vote doesn’t stand a chance. It just doesn’t – no rational person can think that their vote is actually going to work.

“We probably won’t see any reforms around special interests, since those special interests won’t allow that kind of reform. So that isn’t a solution.

“Which makes me look to capitalism itself, knowing that the people involved are all really good people, and knowing that it is the most powerful force on Earth. So why fight it? Why not work within it?

“The notion of ‘Common’ is inspired by a new branch of thought within corporate America. It’s tiny but it’s there, this idea of the social enterprise. ^{fig. 15}

“Historically, corporations had to have a social benefit. This function no longer exists today. The original charters were given only if a social benefit was part of how you proposed to work.

“We’re seeing a little of this thinking again. There are social entrepreneurs creating businesses that do social good by the very way they operate. For me, these social enterprises have the potential to infect lots of other businesses. These social ideas, though they may be small now, could spread to change capitalism as a whole, changing the way that all these good people look at their own companies, and their own role within those companies, and how those companies operate within society.

“My favourite example of this is Patagonia, a real bunch of pioneers. You could describe this as a triple bottom-line company for sure: one that measures profits not just by pure economics, but also by the social and ecological impacts of its product. They would, for sure, fall under conscious capitalism.

“When Walmart decided that they wanted to improve their sustainability index and supply chain, they called in Patagonia. It’s just such a great example: Patagonia is a decent-sized company, but it doesn’t have Walmart’s impact. After all, Walmart is a company so big that it constitutes the nineteenth-largest economy on Earth. So when Walmart looks to little Patagonia for inspiration and direction, it thrills me, honestly, because it shows that capitalism’s problems can be fixed from within. It shows that good people are going to pick up on good ideas. We just need to make more partnerships like this.

“Which is where Common comes in. Common wants to create a system to fast-prototype lots of social ventures, and to help social entrepreneurs on their journey. And there will be a community around that, which we’ve begun at www.common.is.

“We’ve begun projects, events and launches and all of that comes under the umbrella of Common and the idea of the Common brand, which is: the first collaborative brand.

“We think that social ventures could actually benefit from collaborating with a shared brand that has shared values. Consumers can say: ‘If I see Common, I know it represents triple bottom-line, I know it represents a social venture, so I feel good about that.’

Bogusky’s latest project, post-advertising. Under the banner “Common,” Alex and his partners seek to update capitalism, and make it a little more pleasant to be around.

“Partly we’re inspired by companies like Virgin, which is a unique brand in that it isn’t vertical. Almost all brands are very vertical. They represent a category. Virgin’s brand represents a set of ideals, and most of those ideals are based around having a good time. But they’ve been able to move those ideals across three hundred different companies. I hadn’t even realized it was that many.

“So we want to create a brand that similarly represents an ideal instead of a category, but this ideal is the social venture and the integrated bottom line. Then we move that across three hundred or a thousand verticles. We’re pretty excited.”