Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > March > 13 > Entry
Panel: Bike sharing
Panel title: Plan B: Can An Ad Guy Bring Bike Sharing to America?
Date and time: Friday, March 13 at 5 p.m.
Panelists: Alex Bogusky of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky
The gist: Ad agency Crispin, Porter and Bogusky has teamed up with health care company Humana and Trek bicycles to create B-cycle, a venture that promotes bike sharing. Crispin is a well-known ad agency with $1.5 annual billings. Clients include Volkswagen, Hulu, Microsoft, Best Buy, American Express and Domino’s Pizza. Did the viral campaign “Subservient Chicken” for Burger King and more recently the talking mannequin ads for clothing retailer Old Navy.
Quotes: “I’ve never been a giant fan of advertising.” “I love the people in advertising.” “I get more joy out of reading AdBusters than Adweek.” “Anything good I’ve been apart of has been the result of sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.” “Mannequins have not smiled since the Depression.” “We are living in interesting times, moving from slightly depressing to suicide-inducing.” “Will bike sharing save the world? No. But it just has to help.” “It’s so easy to ride a bike, you don’t need special clothes.” “I remember when they said magazines were going away because everyone was going to watch VHS.”
Takeaways: Standing-room only at this extremely non-tech panel. Bogusky spoke a little about Crispin: “A holding company for smart people,” with quirky rules like no timesheets. (Cheers when Bogusky said this.)
Bogusky talked about startling statistics related to driving and pollution, including that Al Gore told him that it rained for the first time this year in the Arctic. “Some of this stuff really bums me out,” Bogusky said. It’s easy to get frustrated, why do anything if it can’t be enough, Bogusky said. But you don’t have to solve global warming, you just have to help move it forward a little bit through innovation, he said.
Boulder used to have a bike-sharing program, he said, but the bikes kept getting stolen (similar to Austin’s Yellow Bike Project.) So Crispin started helping design a bike sharing program in Boulder. They developed a logo with a B in a circle, similar to other traffic or city signs. It’s not easy to make a bike that works for people from five foot two to six foot four, Bogusky said, but Trek made a bicycle that did this. Also developed a system for swiping a credit card for obtaining a bike from a bike station. It tells you which bike to choose and it is unlocked so you can remove it. They started testing this in Washington, D.C. and almost got the city of Minneapolis to use it. Then they redesigned the system and added benches for people to sit at the bike stations. They are also exploring using solar panels or adding covers and lighting. Bogusky said they now have 1,000 bikes going into the city of Denver. There’s a lot of momentum behind this movement and Bogusky is even having meetings on setting one up in Austin. “The larger cities are more aggressive on this,” he said.
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