Alex Bogusky: What’s Wrong With ReTweets

Alex Bogusky is co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, or CP+B as those in the know like to say, a large adver­tis­ing agency best known for edge-pushing viral mar­ket­ing. As such, they’re also one of the few ad agen­cies whose work I admire. CP+B has won a slew of awards; they were recently named Creativity’s Agency of the Year and have col­lected a hand­ful of One Club Pen­cils in just a few years.

After a short stint on Twit­ter, Alex pub­licly quit the micro-blogging ser­vice, say­ing it “wasn’t for him.” Intrigued by his thoughts on ReTweet­ing, I asked him to do an email interview.

Dan Zarrella: I’m a huge fan of the viral work CP+B has done, espe­cially for Burger King (most famously the Sub­servient Chicken and most recently the Whop­per Sac­ri­fice). You guys seem to be using new medi­ums and plat­forms to build these cam­paigns. Have you used Twit­ter like this yet, or do you have any plans to?

Alex Bogusky: That’s really kind of you to say. We just love inter­act­ing with con­sumers instead of talk­ing at them. We love the back and forth. We’re play­ing around a lit­tle bit with the Old Navy Super­man­nequins. Just get­ting going but it should get inter­est­ing soon.

DZ: Do you think Twit­ter has reached a crit­i­cal mass yet where big brands are well served by engag­ing the audi­ence there?

AB: I don’t know the raw num­bers for twit­ter but there are cer­tainly some big wins to be had. But we can’t really look at any social media in iso­la­tion because they’re all bounc­ing off one another and influ­enc­ing each other in real time.

DZ: To me ReTweet­ing is an incred­i­bly open and pow­er­ful viral mes­sag­ing mech­a­nism. Do you think ReTweet­ing is going to be an impor­tant tac­tic for viral mar­ket­ing in the future?

AB: It could be. It’s cer­tainly faster at gar­ner­ing more eye­balls than e-mail, IM or chat. The ques­tion will be does it amplify or sim­ply speed up the process. Right now we have no way of know­ing because it hasn’t got the adop­tion yet.

DZ: You and Chris Ander­son (among oth­ers) have recently expressed con­cern with the care­free and often intent-changing way in which the tweets you post are ReTweeted. My under­stand is that the core prob­lem is that if some­one else ReTweets your con­tent, but rewrites it, it may appear that you’ve said some­thing you haven’t. Is this a big enough prob­lem to make you weary of ReTweet­ing as a mar­ket­ing form?

AB: This is my per­sonal issue with retweet­ing and it makes me per­son­ally uncom­fort­able. As a mar­keter I don’t see it as a con­cern. You want peo­ple to put their stamp on mar­ket­ing even if it seems neg­a­tive. Con­sumers play rough and you have to let them play. But as a con­sumer I would be con­cerned that some­body can appear to be putting your thoughts for­ward but in fact they have changed them. Maybe even reversed them. It seems like it would ben­e­fit the ser­vice to some­how lock the orig­i­nal mes­sage if it is pre­sented as a RT.

DZ: What do you think is the most excit­ing and/or impor­tant thing about Twit­ter for viral mar­ket­ing going for­ward? (Is there any­thing excit­ing or important?)

AB: I don’t like to approach new media as a mar­keter. I pre­fer to approach it as a con­sumer and that appre­ci­a­tion is more likely to inspire think­ing that might help our clients. Like any new media there will be sig­nif­i­cant resis­tance to marketing/advertising. That was a huge them with Sub­servient Chicken. It was actu­ally the first hyper suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing foray into the web and it pissed a lot of peo­ple off. We can expect some of the same here. Twit­ter will also put off inte­grat­ing mar­ket­ing into the ser­vice for as long as pos­si­ble to get the raw num­bers up and the behav­ior fully adopted. But at some point to mon­e­tize they will prob­a­bly look to adver­tis­ers. So I think we can expect the tools that mar­keter have at their dis­posal to increase in the same way it did with Google. It may all be fairly invis­i­ble to the user ala adwords but the abil­ity to mon­i­tor and jump into real time con­ver­sa­tions will have tremen­dous appeal. I’m a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of its actual value or to put it more accu­rately I think this oppor­tu­nity will be over­val­ued in the begin­ning in much the same way ban­ners were over­val­ued in the begin­ning and then saw that value plum­met. But I’m not a futur­ist. Specif­i­cally because I’ve been around long enough now to see that most pre­dic­tions don’t pan out. What I like about twit­ter is what’s hap­pen­ing right now and what will be hap­pen­ing in the next fif­teen min­utes. It’s extremely exciting.