Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World's Hottest Agency to Find His Soul

Alex Bogusky, advertising Dadaist, postmodern media manipulator, pop-culture Houdini, daddy of 21st-century advertising, and now a seeker of meaning on the dirt path of life, invites me and his monk into the FearLess Cottage. Inside the quaint cherry-brick-and-wood house, so placidly typical of Bogusky's adopted hometown of Boulder, Colorado, are the props of an adman attempting rehab. There are the wrinkled tubes of acrylic paint lying like fallen soldiers next to a canvas and easel, an acoustic guitar alongside a cowhide chair, and a wood-framed mirror from Bogusky's former Crispin Porter + Bogusky client Russ Klein, Burger King's ex-president of global marketing. Inscribed on the mirror is a quote from Mother Teresa. "If you are kind," reads the gift, "people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway."

It is mid-May, three months after Bogusky quit Crispin, a month and a half before he will abandon the advertising business altogether. The monk and I are among the first guests to visit the FearLess Cottage. The monk, in essence, was Bogusky's going-away present to Crispin; last December, Bogusky hired Greg, a late fortysomething from Wisconsin who recently spent six years in absolute silence in a bamboo hut in Burma, to teach "mindfulness classes" at Crispin's Boulder office. Back then, Bogusky was still cochair-man of the hottest ad shop in the country -- last year, Advertising Age crowned Crispin both Agency of the Year and Agency of the Decade -- but within five minutes of meeting the monk, he explained that he was existentially stuck. "Now I think some people are worried the monk will go away since I'm not there," says Bogusky. "I was looking for his next benefactor, but then I was like, The monk is cheap, I'll just pay for the monk." Greg, whose translucent blue eyes suggest that all his troubles are behind him, gives me his take on Bogusky's transformation: "Alex's struggle was around doing good in the world and the sense that it may not matter, that it's not going to have a big enough impact soon enough or fast enough."

(1) The FearLess Cottage Bogusky has made this the Boulder center of his post-Crispin reinvention, and a hub for activists and entrepreneurs.

If only it were that simple. Bogusky first told me about his struggle, and his effort to become unstuck, in April, over coffee at a midtown café in New York. It quickly became clear that he was not the same man I had written about more than two years ago, when Fast Company lionized him on the cover as "the Steve Jobs of the ad world." Back then, he had been as clever, brash, and iconoclastic as the campaigns that earned him a reputation as the most dangerous weapon in advertising. Bogusky relished playing cultural deviant -- whether it was recasting Virgin Atlantic as late-night porn, turning Volkswagen drivers into crash-test dummies, pranking Whopper fans into mass hysteria (or, yes, transforming a human-size chicken into a virtual S&M toy) -- and all the mystique that came along with it. Year after year, while the industry waited for him to stumble, its bad boy continued seducing bigger and more unlikely clients, such as Microsoft and Best Buy, while the cult of Crispin hogged virtually every award from Cannes to the ad trades. Crispin's clients benefitted from his madness: Burger King was a private company when Bogusky first took it on. He pushed the company to roll out the most aggressive fast-food tactics ever seen -- "innovations" such as Chicken Fries (chicken fingers turned into French fries), Meat'normous (with 47 grams of fat, the breakfast sandwich was dubbed "a heart attack on a bun"), and Flame (a flame-broiled-meat cologne) -- and created so much buzz that BK went public in 2006, boosting its annual revenue 25% since then, to $2.5 billion in 2009.

Yet the Bogusky sitting before me in Manhattan sounded more like some of the activists I'd interviewed in this era of financial and environmental crises. Instead of talking brands, Bogusky riffed on the inequities of Wall Street, the flaws of corporate structure, and the need for social and environmental transparency. He was a man released, trying on the clothes of a new and as yet undefined life. "I've freed myself from Crispin," he exhaled. Who was this person? I wondered. I wasn't the only one asking the question. "I have to go figure out, What the fuck is Alex?" Bogusky spilled, as if I were his therapist. "I don't know."

Read "Believe It or Not, He's a PC"

And our ongoing coverage of Alex Bogusky.

I asked Bogusky if I could chronicle him on this journey, have in on the enlightenment and the confusion. Given that we live in a world of open confession, and that no one is more in tune with the zeitgeist than Bogusky, I wasn't surprised that he said yes.

And so here I am at this cottage in Boulder, with the most famous man in advertising and Greg the monk. Shuffling around his modest hideout in frayed jeans and flip-flops, Bogusky, who this afternoon resembles an amber-tinted Billy Crudup, tells me, "I wasn't attached to the idea that I was an ad-creative-director rock star. I don't believe any of that stuff. It isn't my legacy. I guess I just don't aspire to corporate legacy. I'm convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that's achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can. The 'you' needs to go away for there to be the real greatness to things. So for me, the genuine part, it's a weird thing -- to get to the real you, you have to be less you."