Liveblog – Alex Bogusky lecture at BYU

Thanks to aaronmentele on Flickr for the image.

Alex Bogusky spoke at BYU as a guest lecturer on  April 15th. I was fortunate enough to attend and liveblogged the event via Twitter. I’ve commented on a few notes that stood out to me. If you’re interested in checking out the unabridged version of the event, click here.

What “safe” advertising is, is often viewed backwards – blowing a $300M budget on something that doesn’t get noticed isn’t “safe”.

Some people want to advertise but they don’t want to be noticed. In my opinion, that means they’re advertising to themselves, their boss or their stockholders…not their customers.

You can blow your advertising budget on vanilla advertising or you can “risk” it on something creative – something that will stand out. Yet, for some reason people view “risky” in advertising as a negative. I liken risk in advertising to risk in investing: the greater the “risk” the greater the potential return.

Whopperfreakout – brave brands will be willing to mess with their customers a bit.

Companies seem very paranoid about offending anyone, let alone messing with the heads of their customer base. (I’ve known of clients who were afraid of offending their competitors.) But it can, and should, be done.
Consumers play rough with brands.

Just because there’s rough play with a brand, doesn’t mean there isn’t an affinity for it – “Taco Hell”

Alex calls it Taco Hell. So do his friends. But do you know where they decided to eat lunch? Yep. Taco Bell.

He also mentioned that Coke was worried about their brand when people started putting Mentos in their two-liter bottles and sticking the results on YouTube. Was it OK? What did it mean? He reassured them that it was OK. I think he was right. The top five or so “Coke Mentos” YouTube videos have received an estimated 25 million views cumulatively.

Clients are asking for everyone in the agency to come up with ideas…”Creative department” is a terrible name. I want it in all departments other than accounting.