Alex Bogusky: After Elvis Has Left the Ad Building
It’s undoubtedly hard to leave any industry unscathed after you are annointed as messianic. For Crispin’s Alex Bogusky, his departure was akin to an ascension, but the reasons for pulling the corporate ripcord were less than clear.
Via Fast Company: [W]hen news broke that after a mere five months into Bogusky’s new gig, The One was abruptly quitting MDC, the odds of Crispin staying on top got a bit slimmer. “The problem with the Jesus model is it’s hard to institutionalize,” a former executive of an MDC agency told me. “Alex has created a cult of Alex. It’s all about what does Alex think of this? and the how much time do I get with Alex model. Now Jesus is off skiing.”
From the standpoint of losing talent as it graduates from a client-service world to a how-can-I-engage-directly, Alex “The One” Bogusky – the love child of Mad Men‘s Don Draper – has staged his exit with a few independent pursuits.
As Chief Creative Insurgent (a rather ingenuous C-suite acronym) at MDC, Bogusky was baking an anti-ad set of recipes: radical, indie books, blogging and web tv programming.
Bogusky has annoyed Crispin clients before, most specifically when he published a book “9-Inch Diet” which protested America’s supersize tendencies—something that didn’t go over well with notable client Burger King and Domino’s (both of which are still with Crispin). These days he blogs and has a Web TV show called “Fearless TV,” in which he rails against genetically modified food and questions consumerism in general.
So what drove the disinterest, if that’s the alliterative word choice? Was it doldrums, disillusionment or just human depletion? Retirement was mentioned in the same breath as MDC damage control; however, if it was simply bored and bankrolled, why not drop into more typical endowments?
Why go rogue individual creator when you could literally buy your way into the non-profit world or start your own micro-industry, a la publishing, television, new/digital media or electric transportation.
The consumer release that appears to be timesharing Bogusky’s so-called retirement (“My So-Called Retirement” television project, MTV?) is relatively unique. Tom Freston went back out to the Middle East after departing Viacom, then advised Oprah on discovering her own cable network.
The creative rich tend to become behind-the-scenes’ advisers, cum achievers, after they leave their corporate mother ships. Forget Branson, Trump and (Mark) Cuban – not sure Mark will ever acquire the one-branded-name mention – each of which are pursuing wealth creation in mass-commercial ways.
What will Alex do?
But then, perhaps we’re not meant to follow… Maybe his direction is confusing on purpose to say he’s trying to devolve from a revolutionary creative guru into an evolutionary-backwards prosumer (i.e., professional consumer) and eventually crawl as a consumer, who looks to eventually cut the umbilical yoke and be a Luddite (those closed systematic breakers of mechanical looms). No commercials, no brands, no consumption.
We end with completely unrequited and -requested exhortation:
Break the looms, Alex. You broke the molds of advertising and image brand-making, now break what it means to be “beyond caring.” Carpe mutatio — seize the change, and make it intimate as opposed to mass.
But tell the few what you’re doing in the desert. And when you’ll be back.
