AOL
Agency New Business Pitch
In early 2003, I had an opportunity to freelance for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a super creative ad agency in Miami. It was a humbling experience about work ethic and what it really takes to do the best advertising work in the country. This particular agency has made a name for themselves out of this philosophy: Buy a billboard or a newspaper ad, or create a campaign for a small amount of money, but make it so creative and buzz worthy that it generates 3 or 4 times the impressions through media coverage and buzz.
We had seen this work for the Marlins in 2003, and it has now become a mainstream part of the advertising strategies of most companies and ad campaigns.
For the AOL pitch, our strategy for coming up with the work was equally advanced. We wanted to advertise what AOL could become, not what it was. This meant diving deeper into why people used the internet. At the time, there was no myspace or facebook, and blogs had only just begun. The theme for the pitch was using the internet to share, and my campaign centered around using the power of a collective network to answer age-old controversial questions through interactive polling... things that are utterly commonplace now.
CP+B did not win the account, and AOL continued to advertise price and features... and lost considerable market share in the following two years, as social networking took the world by storm.
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