The Wexley Way

If you run an advertising agency, there are different ways to pitch a potential client. You can submit a proposal, all neat and workshopped and PowerPoint-y. You can create a mock campaign that dazzles with its vision and insight and originality. Or you can pretend that one of the client's products has poked your eye out. That would be the Wexley way.

Brian Marr, managing director of the Seattle-based Wexley School for Girls -- which is not a school -- has received a tip that a certain office-supply juggernaut is looking for help with a new campaign. So he and Ian Cohen, one of Wexley's two founders, have concocted an idea.

Cohen begins untwisting the wire from a spiral notebook until a nice tangle of gnarly metal protrudes from the spine. He holds it up to his eye and pinches his eye shut, then contorts his face into a painful grimace. Then he howls, not entirely convincingly.

"I like it," says Marr. "We'll e-mail that clip to them with an ultimatum: Your dangerous spiral-bound notebook has poked out Ian's eye. Give us your business and we'll forget the whole thing happened."

Being young and relatively unknown, Wexley can't rely on word of mouth alone to attract business, and its principals are not at all shy about selling themselves. A favorite technique (for when blackmail doesn't strike quite the right tone) is to build a one-page website known as "Welcome to Kick Ass." The site will be targeted to a specific person, and an original song will be written on his or her behalf. This is how Wexley came to work with Amp, Pepsi's Red Bull competitor. As with the office-supply company, a friend tipped Wexley off that a certain marketing officer might be open to entreaties. So Wexley sent Brett O'Brien, Amp's senior marketing manager, an unsolicited e-mail containing a link. He clicked on it and listened to his song, an excerpt of which follows:

You've got lasers for your eyes and four swords for your hands.

You're 12 feet tall and made of iron clad iron and pure alcohol.

So please don't light a match around you or you'll explode in a fiery ball of sexy hotness the likes of which have never been seen or ever witnesssssssed…

So why don't you give us a call today?

Brett O'Brien and the Wexley School for Girls ooh ooh ooh ooh…

The singing is acceptable but unpolished. And if you are looking for rhyme or rhythm or pentameter, you won't find any. It is what you might call low-fi, which is an adjective that fits easily with much of Wexley's work. O'Brien hired Wexley -- not to create commercials; that's the job of his big agency, BBDO. Rather, he wanted to solicit Wexley's help in naming some of the Amp products. "It's less about creating large-scale advertising with these guys and more like how do we infuse their influence into our larger message," he explains.

Not every potential client is ready. A while back, Jansport came by. Jansport makes backpacks. Tom Deslongchamp, who is an art director but, like everyone else at Wexley, is agile and contributes to pretty much everything, put on a white jumpsuit and a top hat and squeezed himself into a gigantic Jansport bag that sat in the corner of the upstairs conference room. When Jansport's marketing reps arrived, Deslongchamp hopped out of the bag and handed over the presentations. Perhaps it was a little much -- Wexley didn't get the job. Which is OK. Either you get what Wexley is selling -- a very particular sensibility and approach toward marketing -- or you don't.

This is not Mad Men or Melrose Place. The men and women of Wexley even bristle a little when you call what they do advertising. In their estimation, the ad business is undergoing a shift, one that affects agencies and their clients. The days of huge production teams and million-dollar media buys are waning, and, as the economy slips further into decrepitude and companies have less money to burn, this will only become clearer.

"Across the country, companies are telling their boards, 'Economic downturn; it's terrible out there,' " says Cal McAllister, Wexley's other founder. "And the board should ask, 'OK, what are you going to do about it?' Well, just like the Big Three need to think differently and not fly jets [to Washington] when they have eco-friendly cars to drive, they need to not buy a 30-second spot that everyone is going to TiVo right past and start thinking of other ways to reach their customer. There is less money out there right now, but there is also huge opportunity. People are spending more time getting information and branding messages than ever before. To reach them, it just takes a marketing department to think entirely differently. And that's exactly where Wexley comes in."

Under "What does Wexley do?" on the company's website -- a site that beckons with (to quote its own verbiage) a "half-naked statue lady" and that has a jangly, off-tune fight song -- it reads: "In the true sense of the word 'advertising,' we can act like an advertising agency. That said, we believe everything is advertising: Traditional media, design, packaging…guerrilla tactics and events, even squirrel races, done properly, can be advertising. Fact is, lots of our clients already have traditional ad agencies."

So what is Wexley, exactly? A nontraditional marketing company, perhaps, or an alternative ad agency. Or, to use the industry's latest buzzy categorization, a "media agnostic" outfit -- the idea being that media agnostics don't worship at the shrine of traditional media, which would be print, television, and radio. They reach the consumer in untraditional ways: websites, publicity stunts, viral videos. Whatever you call it, Wexley School for Girls is representative of a splinter cell in the advertising and marketing world -- small, creative operations born in the digital era and nurtured by the rise of the Internet, which provided a new and vast market for media buying that was not only cheap (or free) but also offered access to very specific groups of consumers.

Jonah Bloom, the editor of Advertising Age, says it's impossible to pinpoint the originator of the media-agnostic idea, but he credits the rise of the current movement to "a bunch of independent agencies in the U.K., like Michaelides & Bednash and Naked Communications. What those guys realized was that some other agencies were tending to solve every business problem with the same answer: 'Let's do a flight of TV commercials.' " Trouble was, DVRs were devaluing commercials (which are expensive to produce and place) -- and anyway, these firms found that there were plenty of other ways to speak to customers.