The Wexley Way

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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.

"It's less about the mass conversation as opposed to a whole lot more individual conversations," says Rae Ann Fera, editor of the industry trade magazine Boards. "The buzzword now is engagement. That's why things like events or microsites" -- which are very specific, ephemeral websites pegged to a product or event -- "or alternate reality gaming or experiential design are so big. There are very few situations anymore where you're guaranteed a huge audience. Companies like Wexley can target a smaller audience with a creative idea and really do something cool with impact."

McAllister and Cohen have not much enthusiasm for discussing Wexley as a cheap buy -- they billed $10 million last year, and they will gladly spend your money. But their work doesn't have to cost a lot. Wexley works often with small businesses and small divisions within larger brands. If a company calls and says it has $30,000 to spend on a viral video, McAllister says, he knows that money means a lot to that company -- too much, probably -- and that Wexley can't promise a video that's going to get more than a few hundred views. It will certainly be funny, but what good is that if nobody sees it? Instead, Wexley would rather use viral as one element in a complete media campaign that might even, in the right circumstances, involve a more traditional buy, like some print or billboards.

Take the case of Copper Mountain, a Colorado ski resort often overshadowed by bigger, more famous places like Vail and Aspen. For the current ski season, Copper had $200,000 or so to spend -- money that would typically go to a fleet of magazine and newspaper ads picturing a skier chest deep in powder, with a tag line like "You could be here."

"We were so over that," says Pete Woods, Copper's director of marketing. He called in eight agencies, including Wexley, and told them that, as a "challenger resort" stuck between operations with much deeper pockets, Copper needed nontraditional thinking. Wexley's thinking, he says, was "steps ahead of what everyone else was doing."

Wexley took a look at where Copper Mountain would most likely find customers and targeted Dallas and Austin. In the fall, it hired improv actors, put them in vintage snowsuits, and turned giant tricycles into human-powered snowmobiles it called Snowmobikes. It then collected piles of ice shavings and dumped the faux snow in busy downtown areas, creating a "snow day" that stopped traffic and attracted coverage in newspapers and on TV and radio. Woods says the ersatz ski patrol was so popular that bouncers at local bars invited the patrol in. "With what promotion in the world does the bar buy you drinks?" he asks.

The tag line for the work is National Snow Day, and Woods says the plan is to slowly build a campaign that will end up in Congress, where Copper will lobby for an actual National Snow Day. "The whole campaign is based around the idea that everyone deserves to feel that little thrill of an unexpected day off with zero obligations," says McAllister. "Anyone who grew up in a snow state knows what it's like when your school district is announced on the radio. That jolt is the motivation. We want to bring that to the rest of the country." (In the case of one Austin radio deejay who had never seen snow before, Wexley's snow guns blasted his yard and driveway, then had the station call and wake him up at 5 a.m. Says Woods: "And he goes to the door in his boxers and sees 3 inches of snow in his yard.")

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