Saturday October 15, 2005

Back on the Beat

I’ve got a few pieces in the “Creative Marketers” report in the new issue of Creativity, the ad trade that (as some of you know) I used to call home. In addition to Erick Soderstrom of Converse and Bob Stohrer at Virgin Mobile, I chatted a little with Burger King CMO Russ Klein. While the industry was more or less shocked when Crispin Porter + Bogusky managed to do good (and interesting) work for the notoriously hapless client, Klein—who was brought in by a new ownership group in 2003—spells out the winning formula: Targeting dudes and taking risks. A snippet:

“We view ourselves as a brand with higher risk tolerance than our key competitors are willing to undertake, and we consider that a competitive advantage,” Klein says. “Sometimes sparks fly and you have to have the stomach as a corporation and as a brand to do work that is provocative, and we’re pretty comfortable with that.”

And so we get Coq Roq and that creepy, creepy king (who appears with Klein on the cover) instead of that schmaltz McDonald’s is alway turning out. The story is online, but only for subscribers, unfortunately.

Posted by jim at 03:29 AM ||