Philistine that I am I have to admit I haven’t exactly been jonesing for membership in the Alex Bogusky fan club.

Attending one of the Olympian confabs of the Scali McCabe Sloves creative federation years ago, I was struck by Pat Fallon’s admission (not to be confused with being struck by Pat Fallon which was also a faint possibility) that while he was proud of his agency’s notoriety and domination at the award shows, he was frustrated that they had yet to do great work for the likes of a Chevrolet or a Tide. Big brands in big, crowded and competitive categories with limited product distinctiveness, and where success can take years rather than a single awards cycle.

CP+B has always felt a bit like that to me, more like a promotions agency (albeit a brilliant one) creating a series of spectacular advertising ‘events’ but not necessarily making sustainable brand building campaigns. Which is perhaps a predictable outcome of Bogusky’s vaunted “show me the press release” dictum.

Well I was wrong about His Alexness. He’s a fucking genius. His note to MDC employees in which he explains the role of Creative Insurgent is a template for what agencies have to do to become genuinely valuable to clients again. Which is to reaffirm (to ourselves as much as to our clients) that our real value always was and always will be the objective creativity we bring to business. But at the same time, which is what I think the great one is suggesting, we have to broaden what we mean by ‘creativity’.

Clients assume that what they need are the familiar comforts of process, certainty, guarantees and accountability (and there’s no shortage of revenue starved agencies only too happy to fake it). But they’re drowning in process and accountability. What they don’t have is an ounce of objectivity or a scintilla of creativity. And when they do go in search of objectivity, they hire clones called consultants, merely adding blinkers to an already myopic view.

Well, Colorado’s answer to J.M. Keynes has been delving into real and weighty issues. Energy and sustainability, moral and ethical conundrums, pressures on commerce to give back to as well as take from society. And because he’s not burdened by the quotidian drudgery of making plan or constrained by the bromides of those consultant-clones hired to “address” such issues, it’s more than likely he’ll come up with some unique perspective and useful ideas.

At root our value is not strategy or planning or mass media or social media or technology or research or behavioural science or even making TV ads; our real value is that we’re different. We do all those things, but they are simply the applied bit in applied creativity.

As Alex, or the Mahatma as I now refer to him, puts it “We can feel the rightness and wrongness and not even know why.” The benefits of informed instinct and applied creativity are a tough sell to those who crave certitude, but instinct not research drives innovation and instinct is what most large institutions smother.