From iPod and BlackBerry to Twitter and Wikipedia, we take a look at the processes and people who came up with the names for these iconic tech products.

Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn’t already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult—to say the least.

The makers of these 10 tech products—the iPod, BlackBerry, Firefox, Twitter, Windows 7, ThinkPad, Android, Wikipedia, Mac OS X and the “Big Cats,” and Red Hat Linux—all have displayed certain amounts marketing savvy, common sense and fun-loving spirit in settling on their products’ names. Here are the intriguing, surprising and sometimes predictable accounts of their creation.

[Check out the Slideshow on CIO.com]

For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers.

If only they knew how to do it.

That’s where this article aims to help. We interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. From those conversations and further research, we identified a set of emerging principles for marketing.

But first, a more basic question: What is Web 2.0, anyway? Essentially, it encompasses the set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online. That includes blogs, wikis, social-networking sites and other online communities, and virtual worlds.

Millions of people have become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Second Life, or by writing their own blogs. And a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most companies still don’t appear to be well versed in this area.

So here’s a look at the principles we arrived at — and how marketers can use them to get the best results.

Web 2.0 tools can be used to do what traditional advertising does: persuade consumers to buy a company’s products or services. An executive can write a blog, for instance, that regularly talks up the company’s goods. But that kind of approach misses the point of 2.0. Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.

How can you do that? A leading greeting-card and gift company that we spoke with is one of many that have set up an online community — a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.

A marketing manager at the company says that, as a way to obtain consumer feedback and ideas for product development, the online community is much faster and cheaper than the traditional focus groups and surveys used in the past. The conversations consumers have with each other, he adds, result in “some of the most interesting insights,” including gift ideas for specific occasions, such as a college graduation, and the prices consumers are willing to pay for different gifts.

Similarly, a large technology company uses several Web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration with both its business partners and consumers. Among other things, company employees have created wikis — Web sites that allow users to add, delete and edit content — to list answers to frequently asked questions about each product, and consumers have added significant contributions. For instance, within days of the release of a new piece of software by the company, consumers spotted a problem with it and posted a way for users to deal with it. They later proposed a way to fix the problem, which the company adopted. Having those solutions available so quickly showed customers that the company was on top of problems with its products.

Give consumers a reason to participate.

Consumers have to have some incentive to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences on a company Web site.

One lure is to make sure consumers can use the online community to network among themselves on topics of their own choosing. That way the site isn’t all about the company, it’s also about them. For instance, a toy company that created a community of hundreds of mothers to solicit their opinions and ideas on toys also enables them to write their own blogs on the site, a feature that many use to discuss family issues.

Other companies provide more-direct incentives: cash rewards or products, some of which are available only to members of the online community. Still others offer consumers peer recognition by awarding points each time they post comments, answer questions or contribute to a wiki entry. Such recognition not only encourages participation, but also has the benefit of allowing both the company and the other members of the community to identify experts on various topics.

Many companies told us that a moderator plays a critical role in keeping conversations going, highlighting information that’s important to a discussion and maintaining order. That’s important because consumers are likely to drift away if conversations peter out or if they feel that their voices are lost in a chaotic flood of comments. The moderator can also see to it that consumer input is seen and responded to by the right people within the company.

And, of course, it’s important to make a site as easy to use as possible. For instance, there should be clear, simple instructions for consumers to set up a blog or contribute to a wiki.

Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.

Consumers tend to trust one another’s opinions more than a company’s marketing pitch. And there is no shortage of opinions online.

The managers we interviewed accept that this type of content is here to stay and are aware of its potential impact — positive or negative — on consumers’ buying decisions. So they monitor relevant online conversations among consumers and, when appropriate, look for opportunities to inject themselves into a conversation or initiate a potential collaboration.

For example, a marketing manager of a leading consumer-electronics company monitors blogs immediately after a new-product launch in order to understand “how customers are actually reacting to the product.” Other managers keep an eye on sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us that track the most popular topics on the Web, to see if there’s any buzz around their new products, and whether they should be adjusting, say, features or prices.

In one case, a company found a popular blogger who had spoken highly of the company’s brand. Just prior to launching a new product, the company sent the blogger a free sample, inviting him to review it with no strings attached. The end result: The blogger wrote a favorable review and generated a flood of comments. So the company got nearly free publicity and feedback.

Peter & Maria Hoey

Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.

Many marketers have been trained to bludgeon consumers with advertising — to sell, sell, sell anytime and anywhere consumers can be found. In an online community, it pays to resist that temptation.

When consumers are invited to participate in online communities, they expect marketers to listen and to consider their ideas. They don’t want to feel like they’re simply a captive audience for advertising, and if they do they’re likely to abandon the community.

The head of consumer research for a leading consumer-electronics organization created an online community of nearly 50,000 consumers to discuss product-development and marketing issues. One of the key principles of the community, she says, was “not to do anything about marketing, because we weren’t about selling; we were about conversing.”

In short order, community members not only identified what it was they were looking for in the company’s products, but also suggested innovations to satisfy those needs. The company quickly developed prototypes based on those suggestions, and got an enthusiastic response: Community members asked when they would be able to buy the products and if they would get the first opportunity to buy them. They didn’t have to be sold on anything.

Don’t control, let it go.

In an online community, every company needs to find an effective balance between trying to steer the conversation about its products and allowing the conversation to flow freely. In general, though, the managers we interviewed believe that companies are better off giving consumers the opportunity to say whatever is on their minds, positive or negative. Moderators can keep things running smoothly and coherently, but they shouldn’t always keep the conversation on a predetermined track. The more that consumers talk freely, the more a company can learn about how it can improve its products and its marketing.

One marketing executive recalled the first time she let an online community created for a client interact with very little control or moderation, resulting in an animated discussion about the look of the company’s product. The client, with great concern, asked. “Who told them [the consumers] they could do this, that they could go this far?” Of course, when this process resulted in totally new packaging that helped boost sales, the client was ecstatic.

As another executive of a company that creates online communities for clients told us: “You have to let the members drive. When community members feel controlled, told how to respond and how to act, the community shuts down.”

Find a ‘marketing technopologist.’

So who should direct a company’s forays into Web 2.0 marketing? A number of managers identified an ideal set of skills for an executive that go beyond those of a typical M.B.A. holder or tech expert. We coined the term marketing technopologist for a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction. A manager said, “I’d want to see someone with the usual M.B.A. consultant’s background, strong interest in psychology and sociology, and good social-networking skills throughout the organization.”

Foot soldiers need to be carefully selected as well. One large technology company weighs employees’ proven skills to choose writers for blogs that are read by consumers. The company has long used blogs internally to help employees discuss technical issues, products, and company and industry topics. When it decided to use blogs to raise its profile online, it recruited those who had shown the most skill at blogging within the company. The company currently has about 15 employees who blog publicly, mostly on technology trends, and is recruiting more the same way. Meanwhile, the bloggers plan to meet occasionally to share the lessons learned from their experiences.

Embrace experimentation.

One Web 2.0 strategy does not fit all, and sometimes the best way to find out what’s best for a given company is to try some things out and see what happens.

Blogs, wikis and online communities are among the tools that companies are most commonly using for marketing, but there are other ways to reach consumers. Some of the companies we talked with have gotten their feet wet in the online virtual world Second Life, where millions of users interact with each other through avatars. Companies can sell their goods and services and sponsor events in Second Life just as they do in the real world; one sponsored a contest for the best avatar.

Others are considering new ways to use more-familiar tools. For instance, many companies have long used instant messaging on their Web sites to allow shoppers to chat with customer-service representatives. One executive we spoke with said he would like to experiment with allowing consumers to chat with each other as they shop on his company’s site.

[via WSJ Small Business] By SALVATORE PARISE , PATRICIA J. GUINAN and BRUCE D. WEINBERG

When Vestas, the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer, announced plans for a new U.S. research center, 42 states lined up to make sales pitches. The winning location would be rewarded with hundreds of jobs, millions in tax revenue, and green-business cachet. Finn Strøm Madsen, president of the Danish firm’s tech division, wanted a site near big-name universities, so Massachusetts (MIT) and California (Caltech, Berkeley) seemed obvious choices. Portland, Oregon, was already home to Vestas Americas’ headquarters. But in June, Vestas picked Houston.

Behind every Twitter account is a person. But some of these people ‘hide’ behind organizational brands, obscuring their persona and therefore reducing authenticity and transparency.

While some brands do a decent job of engaging people on Twitter, many don’t, and one could further argue that brand names and logos, as opposed to full names and user images, are not in the spirit of the Twitterverse.

People Talk to People

Twitter is about people sharing information with other people. So how do one-dimensional organizational brands fit into this mix? When you really think about it, they don’t. As an analogy, when you call customer service, a human answers the phone (eventually) and tells you their name – and you’re not talking to “Sprint” or “Dell” but rather “Steve” or “Danny.”

So, does anyone really want to talk to @DunkinDonuts? Or would they rather talk to Bill Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin Donuts of Canton, MA, or perhaps the local franchise owner on Capitol Hill, or a disgruntled but funny summer employee punching in at 4am? People connect with people, and so I think the latter.

Twitter is still deciding how to monetize, and one possible approach would be to charge organizations a fee for using the service as a marketing tool. Most brands are not yet tweeting, but selling a premium service might increase Twitter’s profile and suddenly seem like an attractive strategy. I think this would be a mistake from the viewpoint of people who use Twitter.

Twitter may become little more than an enormous number of feeds, mainly full of nothing of interest to you. And while the system is built to be opt-in, the prospect of wading through 100 or 1000 times more junk when you do searches, companies hiring SEO consultants to put key words in front of your face, and seeing @AnimalCrackers at the top of the TwitterGrader list in my local area are unattractive byproducts of this business model. (Alternatively, brands just might not buy in at all.)

No Brands on Twitter

Thinking about what might be best for people, in my opinion Twitter should not only not charge brands for membership, but also ban them altogether. Not unlike Facebook and other sites, every account would represent a person using a real name, location, and picture.

People could still tout their businesses, hobbies, and anything else in their handle, bio, or feed, but in an environment of authenticity and therefore increased trust. Some people will game the system, to be sure; but they will often get found out through the wisdom of crowds, so what’s the point?

New users would find having only real, authentic people on Twitter more attractive. Let’s face it, not many people use Twitter yet, and a company with a trusted brand like IBM could develop a platform with a better GUI and a few more features that my parents would be far more likely to try out, perhaps initially bankrolled as a public service. Twitter is far from invulnerable.
Personalities Might Help Brands

this-space-for-rentI think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence (I3) organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time. Many people have increased awareness of the government through talking to me and reading my Twitter feed. But I am not a public affairs professional, nor the official brand of the Department of Defense – just an informed, empowered, and hopefully interesting individual.

Having just one personal account would also streamline Twitter’s user base, structuring it in a slight but possibly meaningful way. Why try to gain ambient awareness via TwitterFeed, when each person associated with an organization is a word-of-mouth advertising device?

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist, government consultant, and regular contributor to Mashable.com and other venues. These views are his own and do not represent the official views of any organization.

[via Mashable] by Mark Drapeau

I’ve been fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama’s campaign and its success is a big, bright, “LCD sign” of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way.

Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and even inspire the traditionally unenthusiastic. Some of my favorite attributions are:

Audacity – the fact that Obama wasn’t afraid to “redefine his target audience” and go after states like Indiana who this November voted for a Democrat for the first time in 44 years.

Mobilizing Large Numbers and doing it “Grass Roots” – unprecedented fundraising success by generating large numbers of small donations rather than small numbers of large donations to raise more than an estimated $600 million (McCain raised an estimated $250 million).

The Message Consistency – the message never waivered from the idea of being an “antidote” to the status quo.

But perhaps the most obvious and (to a techie like me) inspiring elements of witnessing this campaign was its focus on social technology to support and propel all of the other techniques.

The use of “new media” from friend building on Friendster to the seemingly simple text message proved to be a powerhouse for the campaign, as it extended the concept of “Team Obama” far beyond campaign headquarters literally into the hands of millions of Americans who voted and vocalized with their typing fingers.

For all the small business owners who couldn’t help wondering, wow – can I do that? My answer is Yes you can! (Sorry couldn’t help myself).

In taking a closer look, the technologies used form a rather familiar list:

• Official Web site: http://www.barakobama.com and http://my.barakobama.com
• Text messaging strategy – enabled via collecting phone numbers on a mass scale
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama
• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/BarackObama
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom
• Meetup.com: http://barackobama.meetup.com/

The list reads like a “who’s who” of social media marketing.

But the real power in these technologies is understanding that the goal is not just to “set up” one tool or another, but to understand each tool’s potential. That potential in the Obama campaign was brought to fruition by:

• having a consistent message
• providing free and open access to “making a connection”
• *always* keeping the tool up to date
• providing pertinent digestible bytes of information that could be read, downloaded, passed on
• leveraging the sheer quantity of enthusiasts and supporters on each tool to disperse messages almost instantly across an unbelievably wide, new network of venues and communities that hasn’t been seen since the invention of television.

Think about the leverage that a database of 948,000 people on MySpace and 3.1 million people on Facebook provides when you have a message to communicate (and consider that vs. McCain’s 221,000 on MySpace and 600,000 on Facebook).

As you think about your business and consider the challenge to build brand, generate buzz and stay on the radar as a small business owner with limited time and a limited budget, there are some very simple lessons to learn here:

1. everybody needs a team. Whether you’re trying to build a team of millions of voters or a few thousand supporters of your business, build a team by building a venue for them to get involved. Even the simplest involvement can be powerful.

2. email, the Web, and cellular technology have created an unprecedented venue for that involvement. Know who should be on your team and know the different ways they like to be involved.

3. Use wisely. Learn how these technologies work and learn by example how they can be leveraged to build a community of supporters for you.

This is an advantage that won’t last forever. As businesses gain competency in these techniques and learn to invest wisely, these techniques will slowly become standards rather than competitive advantages.

But it is possible for a growing small business to build a strategic, cost-effective and impactful social media campaign. As “Team Obama” has shown – yes you can.

Another great article about Obama’s Viral Marketing in TIME MAGAZINE.

[via Inc Magazine] by Maisha Walker

Crispin+Porter completely changed the image of Apple, and returned a brand thought to have been gone in the dump. Partner Alex Bogusky now joins Microsoft to see if he can reinstill the magic that once was the Seattle superpower.

“He looked like Jesus,” confesses a blushing 27-year-old hipster in gray New Balance sneakers and a zip-up hoodie. She is talking about her boss, Alex Bogusky, the man who has built arguably the hottest ad agency in the country, Crispin Porter + Bogusky. And she is trying to make herself heard over the din of conversation at the New Denver Ad Club, where

500 locals have gathered to hear him speak. Bogusky had only recently moved to town after hauling half of his now 700-person operation from Miami to nearby Boulder. “Just the other day, I was walking by the kitchen in the office,” says the young art director, two years into working for Bogusky. “There was, like, this halo over him.”

On this breezy evening in April 2007, six-packs of Molson and the greasy scent of Burger King burgers — two brands revived by Crispin — give the chandeliered concert hall a calculated shot of the lowbrow. In a few moments, the khaki-and-blazer crowd will see the legend live, on stage, where he will share such intimacies as “I once farted on production for a Gap spot” and “Life is a pyramid scheme.” Until then, the anticipation is thick. “It’s kind of like having a major stage production coming to your small town,” says one adman with Frank Sinatra hair. “Like the circus.” Another whispers, “I can’t wait to hear this guy from Crispin Glover!”

For nearly a decade, the unhip have flocked to Bogusky in the hope that a little of his mystique might rub off. There is no more adept a mechanic of cool, and Bogusky can give it — and take it away. In 1998, he helped strip the sexy gloss from cigarette smoking with his raw, award-winning “Truth” campaign. In 2001, he subverted the SUV and Hummer fad by getting consumers to embrace “tiny” with his media-bending stunts for the Mini Cooper. More recently, he resurrected Burger King’s 1960′s-era “King” character, turning it into an unlikely icon, which has since done everything from date reality-TV pinup Brooke Burke to appear in his own Xbox video game that has sold 3.5 million copies.

Bogusky is famous for pushing clients to the edge. His TV work for Volkswagen included a close-up of a horrific, fatal-seeming car crash; for Orville Redenbacher, he called the deceased popcorn pitchman back from the dead; for Virgin Atlantic’s business travelers, Bogusky offered up mock porn on a hotel TV network. “What Crispin has been able to do consistently is not just produce breakthrough work, but actually create new audiences for brands,” says Mary Warlick, who runs the One Club, which awards creative excellence in advertising.

Now Crispin has been handed perhaps its biggest challenge to date: Microsoft. The tech giant stunned the ad world in March when it passed over safer choices like Fallon, JWT, and its agency of record, McCann Worldgroup, and awarded its new $300 million consumer-branding campaign to Crispin. It was an act of courage or desperation, depending on whom you ask. Over the past couple of years, Microsoft’s already problematic reputation in some circles — as the soulless, power-hungry purveyor of lackluster products — has suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds. It spent two years and $500 million on the media blitz around the long-delayed Windows Vista launch, only to see the January 2007 “Wow” campaign, which likened Microsoft’s new operating system to Woodstock and the fall of the Berlin Wall, derided as arrogant and creatively void. Vista itself sold poorly, leading to price cuts of up to 40%. Worst of all, the flop bred a new generation of Microsoft haters. “Microsoft has really lost control of its image,” says Rob Enderle, an influential advisory analyst for tech companies including Dell, HP, and Microsoft. And with its two most formidable competitors — Apple and Google — boasting their own consumer cults, that’s the last thing Microsoft can afford to do.

Nothing is doing more to carve away at Microsoft’s reputation — and contribute to its loss of market share — than the assault launched by Apple two years ago in the form of the “Mac vs. PC” spots featuring The Daily Show satirist John Hodgman. The ads became immediate pop-culture fixtures, spawning more than 1,000 video spoofs on YouTube and taking home last year’s Grand Effie, the ad industry’s highest honor for effectiveness. “Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft,” says Enderle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle, you wouldn’t be able to find the body.” Gartner media research analyst Andrew Frank credits Apple — whose annual media spend is less than half of Microsoft’s nearly $1 billion budget — with single-handedly rebranding Microsoft “as a kind of self-conscious and self-absorbed nerd that is out of touch with the normal lives and needs of its users.”

Countering that nebbishy, pocket-protected image now falls to Crispin. And Bogusky’s team is revved up at the prospect. “There was a time,” says Jeff Hicks, Crispin’s CEO, “when it was Avis against Hertz, Coke against Pepsi, Visa against American Express. I think Microsoft is at the epicenter of the great brand challenge of the next decade — or millennium.”

It’s a month after Bogusky’s team landed the Microsoft account in March, and the Boulder office is splattered with Gatesian fingerprints, including quotes tacked to the stainless-steel fridges in the kitchen that read like awkward, off-key motivational nuggets: There are over 1 billion Windows Live ID authentifications per day, says one. Bogusky works on a raised platform in Crispin’s 70,000-square-foot space, which once housed an indoor soccer field. His desk seems almost to levitate above the vast openness. A shiny new silver MacBook Air sits in front of him, next to his aviator sunglasses.

This is the third Bogusky office I’ve visited over the past year. His workspace in the firm’s Coconut Grove, Florida, office felt like the bedroom of a “departed” teenager: frozen in time, down to the framed photo of Bogusky’s hero, Evel Knievel, in midair on the back of a motorcycle. When I went to the new Boulder digs in the spring of 2007, his office had more mature decor — clean lines, raw wood, and metal. But the polished backdrop didn’t stop him from, at one point, grabbing a No. 2 pencil off his desk to stir his café mocha. “I want to get all the chocolate at the bottom,” he explained. “I’ll probably get lead poisoning.”

His latest office is different. It feels for the first time that I’m talking to an executive. “Life conspires to beat the rebel out of you,” Bogusky says, dropping one of those lines that could be either authentic on-the-fly wisdom or something he once saw on a T-shirt. “I was at a meeting at Nike recently with a bunch of senior people, and that’s just the thought that went through my head. For everyone at the table, I could see how life was trying to beat it out of us.”

There’s a subtext to his new existentialism. Five months ago, Bogusky, 44, decided to abandon his chief creative officer title for a more corporate one: co-chairman of Crispin, along with partner Chuck Porter. Now, instead of grinding out his famously obsessive late-night edits on the agency’s 15 accounts, Bogusky says he’ll focus on “flying out to clients and talking about strategy,” building out a new industrial-design department, and growing the business, which potentially includes international offices in Europe and Asia. That ostensibly puts the creative burden of the Microsoft account on the shoulders of his protégés, Andrew Keller and Rob Reilly, new co-executive creative directors, who have collectively worked at Crispin for 16 years (Keller for 10, Reilly for 6). “It’s up to those guys how they want to run it now,” says Bogusky, who has been with Crispin since he was 26. “For sure, I’m passing the torch.”

Keller, a blond, floppy-haired 37-year-old, and Reilly, a joke-jousting 39-year-old, are well versed in the dark art of cool peddling. They don’t look the part as much as Bogusky (or even Justin Long, the Mac character in the “Mac vs. PC” campaign). But the duo was the creative force behind work for Mini, Virgin Atlantic, Volkswagen, and Burger King. “Subservient Chicken, Chickenfight, Coq Roq,” says Reilly, rattling off a few of the BK campaigns. “I don’t enjoy doing advertising for things that already have tons of cultural momentum, that people love,” says Keller, adding that he’d be less interested in working on a brand like Apple.

The two understand just how delicate the Microsoft project will be. “To try to be cool is to not be cool,” Keller pronounces. “To chase cool, you’re chasing something that already exists, which means you’re always going to be on the wrong side of it, you’ll always be following.”

In April 2007, long before the Microsoft account came Crispin’s way, Bogusky had told me that “Crispin sort of exists because of the revolution in desktop publishing that the Mac brought about. You could be a small shop and compete against Madison Avenue for the first time because all the tools were in your computer.” That may explain why Keller and Reilly are today using their team as an early focus group for learning how to persuade Mac lovers to embrace Windows. “You’ve got a lot of passionate Mac people in here, and they’ve got to get their head around this thing — why Windows is genius,” says Keller. He and Reilly have outfitted their shared office (inherited from Bogusky) with an Xbox 360, which they’ve been using as a wireless hub. But their joint desk also holds two ultrathin MacBook Airs. When I ask if they’re making their team get rid of their iPods and PowerBooks, Reilly responds, “It’s not a matter of forcing people. It’s getting them to want to use it. If you can’t, you’re not going to do great advertising.”

Jeff Steinhour, a Crispin partner who helped reel in the Microsoft business, describes visiting the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. With the “flags and buildings and graphics,” he says, “there’s no mistaking where you are. The vibe is, We know what we’re doing, and we’re pretty good at it.” Of course, that vibe is also part of Microsoft’s problem, a perceived arrogance that has worked against its efforts to become connected with real people, let alone beloved by them. “They need a little bit of a shake-up,” Steinhour asserts. “I think they’re watching the tech world very closely and how brands become popular. They’re saying, ‘How do we get in that conversation?’ ”

“I think Microsoft is the great brand challenge of the next decade — or millenium,” says Hicks. Adds Steinhour: “They need a bit of a shake-up.”

It’s not as though Microsoft hasn’t tried before. In late 2006, as part of its $500 million Vista launch blitz, it enlisted comedian and Daily Show contributor Demetri Martin to do a series of Webisodes; after a national comedy tour, and a special on Comedy Central, the campaign failed to penetrate pop culture and even drove Apple fans to rail on the blogs that Microsoft had ripped off Apple’s Hodgman campaign. The irony is that Microsoft had actually worked with Daily Show cast members Rob Corddry and Samantha Bee before Hodgman was on board with Apple. But to Apple zealots, it didn’t matter. And to everyone else, hipster irony from Microsoft just felt wrong. Whereas Apple helped launch Hodgman into the stratosphere, Microsoft sent Martin back to Comedy Central.

If Bogusky’s creative exit seems untimely, Microsoft sounds unconcerned. “They understand our company and where we want to take it,” Microsoft explained in a prepared statement (the only comment the company would make for this story). Bogusky represented Crispin at the Microsoft pitch and is unlikely to hang back once the creative is developed; his control-freak tendencies are widely known — and desired — by clients. Says one industry person who competed against Crispin for the Microsoft business: “It’s like when George Clooney walks into a room. It doesn’t matter if Hugh Jackman walks in — everyone wants George.”

Bogusky plays down his star power. “When people meet me, they almost always say, ‘You’re shorter than I thought,’ ” he tells me. “That’s the difference right there. The public self is taller.” But his public stature unquestionably makes Bogusky a target, and the industry has been waiting for years — with equal parts admiration and envy — for Crispin to stumble. When the agency won Burger King in 2004, critics said that the shop’s style could only mesh with small, indie brands. When Crispin expanded to Boulder in 2006, competitors said the divided house would implode. Last year, when Volkswagen’s head of marketing abruptly left, insiders predicted Crispin would lose the $350 million account, one of its largest. None of that came to pass. Instead, in the last year the agency has lured blue-chip brands including American Express, Best Buy, Domino’s, Nike, and now Microsoft.

As Crispin draws bigger, more-traditional clients, the risks grow proportionately. Edginess and risk taking mean nothing without results. When I visited Miami and Boulder last year, I sat in on creative meetings for Haggar, a low-end menswear manufacturer, and Ask.com, Barry Diller’s search Web site. Both were being touted by Crispin as the agency’s next big turnaround candidates. But both resulting campaigns — “Making Things Right” for Haggar and “The Algorithm” for Ask.com — met with mixed reviews when they appeared, then fizzled out completely. “You get into these relationships that are like an arranged marriage,” Bogusky says. “Barry [Diller] really wanted us to do the [Ask.com] work. But I think some of his guys were like, ‘We like what we’re doing and don’t want to.’ ”

Crispin also lost Miller Brewing as a client, a $150 million account. (Crispin resigned, but the move was widely reported to have been preemptive.) And while Hicks, Crispin’s CEO, talks about client VW as if it has achieved turnaround status, the work has been inconsistent, and VW’s sales are off 6% this year. Similarly, last year, Crispin pulled off a coup by winning away Nike’s Running and Nike+ business from the sportswear company’s longtime agency, Wieden+Kennedy. Yet when Crispin’s first Nike TV spot came out in December — a testosterone-fueled footrace through time, from the Wild West to the modern day — the reviews were underwhelming. “I think everyone wants to see the work get better than it is,” concedes Bogusky.

Compounding these challenges is the agency’s financial structure. Back in 2001, Chuck Porter, who owned the firm, then a little-known regional shop, decided to sell 49% of it to a small Canadian public company, now known as MDC Partners. “Chuck wanted to cash out a bit, at least to know that he’s not going to die alone in a retirement home,” says Bogusky, who has known Porter, a family friend, since Bogusky was 8 years old.

MDC paid a mere $6.5 million for the stake, plus $9.2 million over time. MDC also secured options to buy additional stakes every few years at a fixed price. Last November, even as hot new digital shops were getting snapped up for hundreds of millions, MDC exercised an option to increase its stake in Crispin by 28% — for just $28 million. Ouch.

“Crispin is 12 times the size it was six years ago,” gloated MDC CEO and chairman Miles Nadal, when I met him last summer at the exclusive Core Club in Manhattan. MDC owns stakes in 40 agencies, but Crispin is its biggest source of profit. In fact, RBC Capital Markets estimates that MDC’s 77% stake in Crispin is worth more than $300 million, far more than MDC’s market value. “The problem,” says Jeff Tkachuk, a media analyst at BMO Capital Markets who covers MDC, “is that Crispin’s value is being dragged down by the other operations, corporate costs, and all the other stuff that’s associated with MDC.”

Even when Crispin wins a client like Microsoft, shares of MDC — now under $7.50 — barely twitch. “In my opinion, MDC should not be a public company,” admits Porter, who despite a lofty MDC title of chief strategist appears to have little operational influence there. “Not that my opinion means that much. Philosophically, MDC is not designed at this point to deliver ongoing quarter-to-quarter growth. That’s just not the way it thinks.”

I asked Porter how Crispin could have locked itself into such an arrangement. “Other people have said, ‘You did a really sucky deal,’ and I’m like, you know, I think the only people who feel good about the deal are me and Alex [Bogusky] — and Miles [Nadal].” Porter argues that selling to MDC gave Crispin the security to take the risks that have made them successful. “It’s impossible to say we would have performed the same way if we hadn’t done it,” he says. “One of the good things about us being such a big fish in the MDC pond is that we do get our way. We would always trade money for freedom. Always. Always.”

Porter does concede one point. “Any analyst would say: a) MDC’s stock is in the tank, and they’re not performing as well as they should, and b) Crispin has performed really, really well,” he says. “So there’s a disconnect here. You can’t deny that.” He pauses. “If you’ve got someone who wants to come and buy the whole thing right now, we can talk — the whole ball of wax, the whole MDC.”

One thousand miles away from Boulder, in a biometrically sealed, Frank Gehry — designed compound outside Los Angeles, sits TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Media Arts Lab. It is in this vaultlike building — created at the behest of Steve Jobs — that the “Mac vs. PC” spots are conceived. Chiat\Day has been making Apple’s ads for nearly 25 years — going back to its iconic “1984″ spot — and the lab’s isolation ensures not only that the creatives do their best work but also that nothing leaks out. “I hear they have some kind of eyeball scanner,” says one Chiat\Day art director I spoke with who, despite having worked at the agency for five years, has never set foot inside the place.

Jobs’s unerring ability to locate and amplify what’s cool in the culture is among the big challenges in Crispin’s quest to give Microsoft new street cred. But Microsoft’s degree of patience and tolerance for risk — even embarrassment — remain major variables too.

“Crispin probably has one chance to do something big with Microsoft, and if it fails, I think all bets are off for the agency,” says Gartner analyst Frank. Crispin certainly knows the stakes are high. “From the outside, this looks like a strange marriage,” says Crispin partner Steinhour. Particularly since Crispin has been the Apple of ad agencies. Add up its knack for creating cultural phenomena instead of piggybacking on them, breaking industry rules only to have others follow, orchestrating mass PR stunts, and even turning brands into bullies without customers realizing they’re being bullied — you could equally be talking about Apple. The folks at Crispin like to give the impression that the Microsoft assignment is less about the money than about the thrill. “I think we’ve learned,” says Steinhour, “that when you take on these kinds of odd relationships with big companies that need a kick start, the motivation to overcome those suspicions is a lot of the fun.” But Crispin knows better than anyone that “fun” isn’t the metric for its clients. Noting that Burger King has had 16 straight quarters of growth since Crispin took on the account, Hicks says, “Your work is only as good as the performance of the brand and the business.”

Crispin has been restricted from revealing Microsoft’s strategy or creative ideas for the campaign, which is slated to break in July (and they’re even being cagey about that date). Whatever is done, though, will clearly involve an attempt at a major personality overhaul. “It’s kind of like 3M,” says Bogusky, who calls Microsoft “smart as fuck.” 3M is “a very cool company, but I don’t think if you see a roll of Scotch tape, anyone’s going, ‘I’ve gotta party with these people.’ ” Bogusky explains that with previous clients, instead of hiding qualities that may seem negative — such as Mini’s tiny proportions or Burger King’s fat content — Crispin exploits them. “It’s part of your job as a marketer to find the truths in a company, and you let them shine through in whatever weird way it might be,” he says.

Naturally, that risks pissing someone off. “I think really good brands have to have something of a thick skin these days,” Bogusky says. Last year for Coke Zero, the Crispin team designed a campaign in which one division of Coke sues another for “taste infringement.” Bogusky says Coca-Cola’s ability to be self-effacing was a disarming way to make the brand likable. “I think it works so well for Coke because it’s the most corporate of corporate,” he says. “It wouldn’t work for Jones Soda.” Then, once Crispin finds a through line that works, adds Bogusky’s disciple Keller, “we pour gas on it.”

For Microsoft, some of those combustibles may lie in the edgier parts of its empire — Xbox, Zune, Halo, even the company’s stake in Facebook. Bogusky hopes Microsoft will give his team the same kind of access Apple has granted Chiat\Day. “A big part of positioning those products is being there in those early stages, knowing what the engineers think the story is, so the story doesn’t get lost,” he says, noting how deep inside his agency has gotten with partners like Burger King. “Apple is probably sharing stuff that maybe it’s afraid to share, but that allows the agency to get in at a level where it can produce work like that.”

Not everyone is convinced that Microsoft’s problem is simply about ad messaging. “Microsoft seems like a company whose executive staff is isolated and unable to move and take corrective action,” says tech analyst Enderle, explaining the obstacles for Crispin. “I worry more on the client side than the agency side.” And while other PC makers like HP have been able to gin up new zeitgeisty appeal — using, for instance, Gwen Stefani and Jay-Z — Gartner’s Frank isn’t so quick to assume that hiring Crispin means Microsoft is ready to really let its hair down. “I suspect what Microsoft would most like to instill in people’s minds is they are innovators and leaders, and that’s what they think of as being cool,” he says.

Historically, that may have been good enough, given that for 30 years most of Microsoft’s customers have been enterprise geeks, not film students and graphic designers. But Microsoft’s increasing desire to be all things to all people — tech titan, advertising company, music hawker, video-game platform — means it may have to do more than just make consumers aware that it is the massive force behind so much of their lives. It may need to make people willing, even eager, to cede that much control to a single company. If Crispin can pull off that stunt, it will be not only the Steve Jobs of advertising but also its Evel Knievel.

[via Fast Company] by Danielle Sacks

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