In the world of advertising, where he was the closest thing to a rock star, the departure of Alex Bogusky from the industry last July felt as if Colonel Sanders had declared himself vegan or that Stephen Harper was joining an ashram.
For more than 20 years, Mr. Bogusky injected commercials into the culture for globe-straddling clients such as Volkswagen, Virgin Atlantic, Mini cars and Microsoft. He had helped to revive the fortunes of Burger King with campaigns like “Whopper Freak-
out,” in which customers were filmed as they were told that the chain's signature burger had been discontinued. The results were then posted online to astonishing viral success.
Fast Company put Mr. Bogusky on the cover and called him “the Steve Jobs of the ad world.” The trade magazine AdWeek crowned him its “creative director of the decade.”
So his goodbye-to-all-that at the age of 47 would already have been news if Mr. Bogusky had simply taken his millions and spent the rest of his days biking around the mountains of Boulder, Colo., where he moved from Miami with his wife and two young kids in 2002. But then he went ahead and turned into a vocal critic of the very form of capitalism he had spent half a lifetime implicitly endorsing. One week before he left MDC Partners Inc., the Toronto-based holding company that owned his eponymous agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, he penned a long blog post calling out companies like McDonald's and Burger King for advertising to children.
It didn't go over well.
“I was actually trying to move into a space where I could agitate the industry, in a good way, with enough distance that it would allow for some new ideas – and force a little bit of, I don't know, shaking the tree,” he says over the phone from Boulder, hints of an adolescent surfer dude drawl still hanging around the edges of some words. “It didn't really work that way. It mostly just created a lot of pain for my friends within the [MDC] network. Their clients got upset at the things I was saying.
“So I thought it was better to move completely out.”
To be fair, Mr. Bogusky was always something of an agitator. Much of his best advertising played with the forms he was using. Sometimes it even approached postmodernism: Nestled within the ads, you could sense an underlying suggestion that advertising may not have been the most karmically legitimate undertaking.
Which may be why, nowadays, he doesn't miss the traditional ad game. “My relationship with advertising was that I was not that fond of it,” he says. “So mostly the way I approached it was to kind of mess with the form. So I was never a fan. I don't watch commercials. I don't, you know, say, ‘Hey, check this one out.' I really don't care about that stuff.”
And Mr. Bogusky wore that ambivalence publicly. In 2008, he penned a book that began with a frank admission: “Advertising ranks just above used-car sales in terms of professions that engender trust.” The 9-Inch Diet made the case that America was experiencing an obesity crisis partly because of a concerted effort by corporations to increase the food intake of consumers. Its publication was reported to have caused not a little consternation in the offices of Crispin Porter + Bogusky's food and beverage clients.
Now, he's doing his agitating from the outside, without any concern for who will be offended. Last fall, he took the wraps off something called FearLess Revolution, an amorphous project that seeks to spur a new relationship between consumers and corporations. With FearLess – the name comes from Mr. Bogusky's belief that “fear is the mortal enemy of creativity, innovation, and happiness” – he is crowd-sourcing a new Consumer Bill of Rights to encourage companies to operate in a more transparent, environmentally responsible fashion.
In late January, he and a couple of FearLess colleagues launched something called Common, which they hope will be an umbrella brand for perhaps dozens of innovative start-ups that share the transparent, community-oriented, communal values that Mr. Bogusky believes are emerging as necessary ingredients in business success. “We're moving from a competitive advantage to more of a collaborative advantage,” he says.
