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Alex Bogusky was on the cover of Inc. magazine a few months ago with the headline something like “Can this Hot Guy Make Microsoft Cool?” Well, Crispin Porter + Bogusky are off to a good start w/ the Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates commercials, and even better, the PC commercials. So, I pose the question – did Bogusky make the Inc. 5000 Conference cool? Having been to 2 consecutive years of conferences, I can clearly say that it was already very cool before he came along, but Bogusky did a really good job of speaking to more than just creativity but accomplishing business objectives in a creative way. Here are my notes:

CP & B: 900 employees, 900 freaks, early on, worked with a ton of underdogs. Very Scrappy.

The Truth Campaign- Anti-Smoking
Change the cultural perceptions around a product Brand around youth rebellion. Rebellion is great. This choice is not rebellion, it’s about being manipulated by a huge machine (tobacco campaigns).

Advertising must play into PR and web, social “Playing with your consumer”

Molson Beer- 200 different labels “I’m not wearing any underwear”

Creativity is just a way to leverage business goals

Burger King Whopper Freak out- people got really pissed off with no Whopper. Super funny.
• embrace the creative process – makes it fun
• “you know what you ought to do,” have someone fill in the answer

CP+B 1 Rule: NEVER LIE. NO FIBS. NO BS. (more…)

At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.

Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).

Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80′s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000′s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.

In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product – The Whopper – with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.

Takeaway for MediaPost – get more creatives as speakers and show the work – Porter rocked!

Last night, I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to Rick Webb, co-founder of The Barbarian Group, speak on driving the whole viral marketing world forward. As the creators of Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” and Milwaukee’s Best “Beer Canon” shown below, these guys continually prove that being original is the only game to play.

Rick’s prognostications of the top 4 trends for ’07 in the web marketing world:
1. Niche Social Networking
2. Games (adver-games)
3. Branded Utilities (widgets)
4. Entertainment (where video truly becomes interactive again rather than just YouTube)

Chuck Porter, Chairman of Crispin, Porter, & Bogusky – arguably the hottest agency in the world right now, spoke at OMMA East today about the success of his agency and the secret of viral marketing.

In his presentation, Porter brought up examples of how the world is moving so fast that a big news story hits for a few hours and then that person / story is forgotten about. This is often true of ”memorable” ad campaigns. The lifespan of great ad campaigns has gotten shorter and shorter with so much noise out there, especially with user-generated content. In fact, one panelist on ”The Creative Panel” pointed out that 90% of big box-office Hollywood films fail, so why expect all TV advertising to succeed? Coming up with and executing upon a big idea is exceedingly difficult and there needs to be a tolerance around how to define success.

The Secret of Viral Marketing

Case Study: Burger King’s Subservient Chicken
www.subservientchicken.com
This site launched 3 years ago and within 12 days, there were 100 million hits to the site and the average amount of time spent on the site per user was 7 minutes. 3 years later, there have been a total of 460 million hits and it completely resonates with the 16-25 year old male demographic who are powereaters at Burger King.

More Chuck Porter advice:

To see the video clips of Chuck Porter’s presentation AND to see his entire presentation via video, go to OMMA’s specific webpage here to check it out>>