2. School the creativity
iMedia: How do you manage your staff to foster creativity while encouraging strategic thinking?
Bogusky: There's a little bit of work to be done to adjust people. I think as an industry, we sometimes get it a little wrong. We think that our creative goals are at odds with commercial goals. Until you get through that, you don't ever become a great creative person.
We're not in the business of making cute little films and throwing logos on the end of them. We're in the business of being really compelling.
One thing we do as we begin a creative project, instead of working on specific media, we write press releases about our ideas. For example, a press release for the Whopper Freakout campaign would say, "Burger King announced today they would be removing the Whopper from their restaurants." It would go on to talk about consumer outrage. It's a good way to determine whether you have a rich idea or not. If an idea is good enough for someone to write about, it's probably good enough for someone to talk about.
3. Follow your nose instead of the money
iMedia: Explain your product innovation strategy and how it fits in with the traditional agency business. You've reinvented the kitchen sponge, for starters.
Bogusky: Reinventing the sponge is really fun, and it's such a small creative box. "Design more sponges." What could be more impossible?
Our approach to industrial design is purely around brand: creating products that best illustrate the values of the brand and that potentially have marketing baked into the actual design. For example, the Twist sponges we designed are actually branded with little tags. They're pretty enough to be left out, so if you're in somebody's kitchen, you see the sponge and the Twist brand.