Some of the BG team attended the San Diego Ad Club event last night that featured a discussion with Alex Bogusky. For those of you who aren’t familiar with who Bogusky is, he’s been hailed as the guy who built the hottest ad agency in the country and one of his staffers went so far as to say he resembles Jesus. Needless to say, I was very curious to attend the event last night and listen to him speak (and maybe even see him walk on water). Here are my top takeaways:

• Fear is the worst thing you or a client can have.
• Clients will often fear putting themselves out there or trying to do something different or new, but they rarely fear maintaining mediocrity. Why is that? 
• His agency always judges themselves and the effectiveness of their work by client sales. 
• Get rid of timesheets. Good work can’t be judged by the number of hours spent.
• He doesn’t believe in client conflicts. 
• If you’re buying less than 150 points in media you’re invisible. 
• If you want to grow business from local to regional and then regional to national you have to start proactively taking on those new clients. Example: If trying to expand client base to national from regional, you need to turn down the $5 million regional account and take on the $1 million national account. 
• Over invest in opportunities so you can then have cases and examples to roll out to other clients or potential new clients. 
• Start every new creative concept by writing a press release. 
• Would not and could not comment on Microsoft. Not even slightly or casually reference them. (I wonder if Bill Gates has a hit man following him around to be sure he doesn’t spill any juicy tid-bits?) 
• This one is just for fun: Kelsey (from BG) and I were trying to figure out who he reminded us of. Here’s where we landed:

Slightly resembles Billy Crudup. Might look like John Fogerty when he’s older. And maybe it’s just the hair, but a little bit of John Cougar Mellencamp.

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