The Wexley Way

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As a microshop, Wexley isn't able yet to make a play to be a big company's agency of record, but that's not really what it wants now. Rather, Wexley, and other smaller companies like it, is biting off little pieces, looking to take on a particular niche of a business -- product launches, say, as Wexley has done more and more often, especially for Microsoft.

Recently, Microsoft asked Wexley to help promote Hyper-V Server, a software program that you would have no reason to know of unless you work in a programming specialty called VM. Wexley's job is to help sell the product to a very limited audience of the guys who matter. An agency that creates commercials and print ads isn't really optimized to think creatively about such a project. The agency would probably say, "Well, let's buy some ads in IT Monthly." But to Microsoft, this is an important product, and it has competition. It's not as simple as just putting the name out there. What Microsoft has found with Wexley is that it can hire a bunch of people willing to apply their wacky energies to even the most boring of products.

For one thing, Wexley decided to crash last September's VMWorld conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas, sending in hired actors dressed like the Venetian's staff to hand out fliers that said the competition's software was no better but cost more. On the back was a $1 gaming chip. A frenzy broke out; one attendee stole an entire bag of fliers and chips.

"Just that idea became viral," McAllister says. "Tech bloggers were at the conference; they took pictures and put it up."

"We know you want something viral, but maybe you don't want a video," says Cohen. "Maybe you want something like that. Those 2,000 people are a whole lot more valuable than a bunch of people who really don't care about the product."

When Microsoft drafted Wexley to work on its college recruiting efforts, in which it had been struggling against more glamorous companies like Google, it was another seemingly unsexy piece of business but a critical one for a technology company built on big brains. So Wexley launched a campaign called Hey, Genius!, which targeted the top students across America. Wexley sent the students e-mails with links to websites that -- literally -- sang their praises. It drew up sandwich boards with students' names on them ("Hey, Sean Lynch!" for example) and had actors stand outside their classrooms wearing them. It built the first ever Jobcuzzi, a hot tub parked in student unions and occupied by a sycophant in a suit who barked congratulatory greetings at prospective hirees.

The campaign hit more than 60 colleges and had 72 distinct creative pieces. "It was about as integrated as it gets," Cohen says. And it cost less than $1.5 million.

You know what Microsoft did the year before it hired Wexley? It bought ads featuring stock art and tag lines like "Options are good" and gave out pens and stress balls. ("Stress balls?" says Marr. "What kind of message does that send?")

"This year, they closed their numbers four months early," says Marr, who notes that he recently spotted a kid at LAX in a Wexley-designed "Hey, Genius!" T-shirt.

He smiles. "Everything is a brand opportunity."

Not even two years ago, the Wexley School for Girls consisted of 18 people in 1,000 square feet described by McAllister as "more like an undergraduate independent newspaper club space." The bathroom was 3 feet from his desk. "And it had saloon doors." The rent was $1,100 a month. "That is how you keep costs down," says Marr.

The School existed at that location for three and a half years, McAllister says, until the day it moved to Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, into a former print factory that, according to the plans, was meant to have a retired helicopter attached to the roof. (The landlord approved this request, but the deal for the chopper fell through.) Inside, there is a faux Chinese restaurant with faux chickens hanging in the windows (it houses production, and, yes, people have stopped in inquiring about lunch) and a woodland-themed miniature golf course that winds among the desks where the creatives sit.

Wexley was founded in 2003, when, after a few years of working for Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, Cohen acceded to his wife's desire to return to Seattle. He thought the city lacked a firm like Wexley and saw no reason he couldn't start one himself. McAllister, whom Cohen had hired as his replacement at Hammerquist & Saffel in Seattle when he first decamped to Portland, was more than ready to quit his big-agency job at Publicis (where he had since moved), and so the two men set up shop. Cohen was 35; McAllister was 32. They spent their first few weeks filming themselves doing things while wearing University of Washington women's volleyball uniforms. Their first video: jumping and touching stuff. "I was like, Running a company is easy!" says McAllister.

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