Markets

Pig Wrestling for Managers: Advertising's Alex Bogusky Takes on the Media -- and Loses

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: August 11, 2010 / 1:48 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Alex Bogusky, the best-known advertising executive on the planet who abruptly retired earlier this year after criticizing the business that made him famous, has published a line-by-line response to a Fast Company profile of him that paints him as a "pathological narcissist" who treats his employees like dirt and is a master manipulator. Bogusky derides the article for taking things "out of context" and being a "lost opportunity" even though it describes him as "one of the greatest interpretive artists in advertising history ... a genius."

The overall impression for the outside observer is that this is the management version of pig wrestling: All parties -- Bogusky, the magazine and his critics (who were quoted anonymously) -- emerge looking dirty, and the pig loves it. Executives might do well to avoid this kind of unrestrained meltdown.

Clearly, the writer struck a nerve. It's the most public blow-by-blow since Goldman Sachs pr man Lucas van Praag's takedown of the New York Times. Rather than making the article look weak, however, Bogusky's response merely exposes that nerve further.

Bogusky cut and pasted the entire article onto his Posterous blog and offered his commentary in additional blue text. He starts with two petty clarifications to do with an earlier article Fast Company had written about him, titled, "Can this Dude Make Microsoft Cool?":

... nobody at CPB ever had as a mission to make Microsoft cool.

He mentions that he failed to to talk FC out of using that headline. While the word "cool" may not have been in Microsoft's brief to his ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, it's a perfectly reasonable characterization of the way clients ask their agencies to boost sales. Bogusky seems annoyed by it simply because FC refused to do what it was told. There's another pointlessly slight qualification regarding FC's description of his father as a "logo designer":

A graphic designer who did logos. Not a logo designer.

But the most vicious part of the story is where Bogusky's former employees are quoted anonymously:

He's Citizen Kane ("the most miserable rich guy"), Fidel Castro ("megalomaniac, sociopath, narcissist"), Caligula ("at the end of the Roman empire"), or Hannibal Lecter ("the handsome guy behind the Plexiglas").

Those staffers have a completely legitimate reason to dislike Bogusky: One day in 2005 Bogusky announced he was moving the agency from Miami to Boulder, Colo., simply because he wanted to live there. Employees weren't given a choice -- or moving expenses.

The author, Danielle Sacks, even asks a psychiatrist to diagnose Bogusky, even though the shrink hasn't met him: The doc doesn't take the bait but Sacks frames her definitions of "pathological narcissist" and "sociopath" as if they fit Bogusky. He replies:

Really, Danielle? Business Week was able to talk to people for weeks and came up with completely different stuff. Oh, you have to excuse me while I get back to clubbing a baby seal.

What both FC and Bogusky fail to explore, however, is Bogusky's delusion that:

What's happening in culture and what's happening with me isn't an isolated incident. I meet people every day that are considering radical career changes or have already left their high-paying job to participate in a new way. My story could have served as a metaphor for a new crisis that so many of us are feeling.

To be clear, "what's happening" to Bogusky is that he received $25 million in an earnout agreement with CP+B's parent company, MDC Partners (MDCA). That's why he was able to suddenly stop working and start criticizing his former client, Burger King (BK), for exploiting children. The fact that Bogusky believes this type of event is happening "every day" -- and that people who follow the adbiz believe Bogusky quitting involved some kind of soul-searching sacrifice -- is the major delusion going on here. The "new crisis" is 9.7 percent unemployment, not bags of banknotes raining from the sky.

It's easy to quit and follow a dream if you never have to work again. Yet neither FC nor Bogusky seem able to say this out loud.

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