Crispin Porter + Bogusky

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Crispin Porter + Bogusky

3390 Mary Street, Suite 300
Miami, Florida 33133
U.S.A.
Telephone: (305) 859-2070
Fax: (305) 854-3419
Web site: http://www.cpbgroup.com

Private Company
Incorporated: 1965 as Crispin Advertising, Inc.
Employees: 50
Gross Billings: $500 million (2005 est.)
NAIC: 541810 Advertising Agencies

Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB) is an advertising agency renowned for using unconventional methods to build brand awareness. Television commercials, the foundation from which most marketing campaigns are built, rarely underpin CPB's work for a client. Instead, the agency develops novel ways to attract the public's attention. CPB's most notable clients have included MINI USA, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Burger King, Miller Lite, and Volkswagen. The agency is based in Miami and operates a second office in Venice, California. MDC Partners Inc. owns 49 percent of CPB.

ORIGINS

CPB reveled in its role as an industry iconoclast, relishing the attention paid to it and to its marketing campaigns. The agency sparked controversy, defined new frontiers in advertising, and won national and international awards, figuring as one of the most prominent firms in the industry during the first years of the 21st century. CPB also ranked as one of the fastest growing agencies, increasing its annual billings at an exponential rate, but all of the attention and business generated by the company came after decades of relative anonymity. For three-and-a-half decades, CPB led a dormant existence, operating without national distinction and bearing little resemblance to the bold and brash agency that basked in the public spotlight as it celebrated its 40th anniversary.

CPB was formed in 1965 by Samuel D. Crispin, who named his company Crispin Advertising and based it in Florida. His company's rise to prominence occurred after his departure, but Crispin hired the two individuals responsible for its dramatic change in fortunes. In 1988, Crispin employed a Minneapolis native named Chuck Porter as the creative director of his advertising firm. Porter, once he had settled into his new position, insisted on bringing in a 24-year-old art director named Alex Bogusky. A Miami native who dropped out of art school, Bogusky was hired in 1989 and quickly found himself holding a leadership position. Porter was appointed chairman of the agency in 1990, which made room for Bogusky as the firm's creative director. Crispin left the company in 1991, and his son Charles sold the remaining stake owned by the Crispin family in 1993. With Porter as chairman and Bogusky as creative director, CPB developed into a national creative force for the first time, but the seminal moment in the agency's development occurred nearly a decade after the influential pair took command.

Porter and Bogusky instilled a new mind-set at CPB, one that would underpin the agency's rise to prominence. Porter established a policy that ensured the agency would have creative control over its work. He insisted that CPB be treated as a partner by its clients, refusing to work with clients who treated his agency merely as an advertising vendor. Bogusky lent personality and creative thrust to CPB's work, utilizing the power created by Porter's policy. Never reluctant to create controversy or to stray from convention, Bogusky embodied the daring and unorthodox approach to advertising that would lift CPB toward fame, expressing the quintessence of his perspective when announcing the deal that ended decades of obscurity for the agency.

"We want to get into a whole lot of trouble," Bogusky said in February 9, 1998 interview with Advertising Age, referring to the Florida Department of Health's decision to award CPB a campaign to curb smoking by teenagers. The contract allowed Bogusky to express his vision of how a marketing campaign should be run, becoming a prototype for the strategy that later would be applied to consumer brands. Initially dubbed "Rage" and later renamed "Truth," the campaign's theme was delivered to the public in a variety of ways, but conspicuously absent were well-polished television commercials, the staple of conventional marketing campaigns. Bogusky created a corporate Truth logo and put it on posters, leaflets, T-shirts, stickers, and apparel. Trucks and trains criss-crossing Florida bore the Truth logo, as did live events and parties staged throughout the state. The agency organized teenage activists who launched various assaults against "Big Tobacco," including dumping 1,200 body bags at a tobacco company to represent smoking-related deaths. The Truth campaign sparked intense interest and it was effective—a study later revealed that between 1998 and 2002 teenage smoking in Florida decreased 38 percent—prompting the American Legacy Foundation to select CPB to orchestrate a national campaign. The decision by the American Legacy Foundation to award CPB a national contract turned the agency into a national creative force for the first time in its 35-year history. In the years ahead, Bogusky would use his new stature within the industry to redefine how advertisers developed branding campaigns.

The success of CPB's anti-smoking campaign legitimized Bogusky's approach to advertising, encouraging him to build brand awareness through unconventional means. "The culture is not something static so we don't really spend time trying to maintain it," Bogusky said in a December 2, 2005 interview with SHOOT. "We spend time trying to change it."

Agencies frequently developed their marketing campaigns around television commercials, but Bogusky instructed his creative team to imagine a world without television and magazines and discover other ways to make a brand famous. The approach worked with the Truth campaign and it scored success with CPB's promotion of the MINI Cooper, "one of the most celebrated marketing efforts in recent years," according to the April 2004 issue of Business 2.0. MINI USA selected CPB to pique interest in the tiny British automobile model in 2001, unleashing Bogusky and his Miami-based staff to develop an avant-garde media campaign. The agency developed a "Let's Motor" campaign that shied away from television commercials, which was a first in modern-day automobile marketing, and focused on displaying the MINI in numerous settings. The automobile was paraded on top of sport-utility vehicles, inside sports stadiums to serve as seats for spectators, and as centerfolds in Playboy. At CPB's urging, leasing deals were rewritten to reduce penalties for high mileage. The agency developed a line of gear bearing the MINI logo, and, in its strangest attempt to stir interest, the CPB team created a fictional story about counterfeit MINIs that enjoyed widespread circulation on the Internet. By the time the MINI was introduced in the United States in the spring of 2002, customers faced a six-month wait to purchase one of the highly coveted MINIs.

COMPANY PERSPECTIVES

We're a factory. A factory that makes advertising and branded creative content. But there's no assembly line. All the work is custom designed and assembled by hand. We don't have the luxury of knowing the product we build today will be exactly like the product we built yesterday. To be successful, we have to approach every single day like it will be our defining moment. Because that's reality.

CPB, once consigned to the backwaters of the advertising industry, found itself the talk of the industry after its national success with the American Legacy Foundation and MINI USA. The agency attracted the attention of Miles Nadal, a Toronto, Canada businessman who accumulated a vast fortune in private equity and check printing. In 2001, Nadal acquired a 40 percent stake in the agency and grouped it with his newly formed MDC Partners Inc., a holding company that owned parts of 32 companies involved in advertising, design, communications, and sales promotion. In September 2001, CPB opened a second U.S. office, in Venice, California. "It's not going to be a satellite shop," Bogusky explained in an October 5, 2001 interview with SHOOT. "The goal for that shop is to grow into a decent-sized, powerful West Coast presence."

HIGH-PROFILE CLIENTS

Momentum continued to build after the MINI campaign, each passing year ending with another major success story. In 2003, the eccentric founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways, Richard Branson, found a perfect marketing partner in the eccentric CPB. Bogusky oversaw the development of a "Go Jet Set, Go" campaign for the airline, creating new ways to titillate the public. CPB designed pajamas for overnight flights, new air-sickness bags, and an in-flight storybook placed in every seat pocket. When the agency's research revealed business passengers had a penchant for ordering from the adult section of LodgeNet, a pay-per-view movie service available in hotels worldwide, it responded with a controversial and highly popular publicity ploy. CPB produced a nine-and-a-half minute parody of a pornography video, without nudity, that 800,000 hotel guests viewed within the first three months of its release. The campaign heightened the awareness of Branson's airline, becoming another high-profile success story for CPB and setting the stage for what would become the agency's crowning achievement.

CPB neared its 40th anniversary enjoying robust financial growth and industry accolades. Billings, which stood at $45 million during the mid-1990s, rose to $250 million by the end of 2003, when SHOOT selected CPB as its agency of the year. The agency's reputation as a sometimes controversial but always effective creative force put it in a position to attract the industry's most coveted clients.

In 2004, the agency won the business of one such client, gaining the advertising account of Burger King Holdings, Inc. Bogusky planned a comprehensive marketing campaign, but he did so in his atypical fashion. At his first meeting with Burger King executives, Bogusky detailed plans to turn packaging and tray liners into advertising vehicles and to change the doors and parking lot signs, all before presenting the executives with an advertising concept. The highlight of the marketing campaign was the Internet phenomenon, the "Subservient Chicken," a person dressed in a chicken suit who performed acts typed in by visitors to a Burger King–sponsored web site. With scant promotion, the web site attracted one million hits on its first day in operation. Within its first nine months of existence, the Subservient Chicken registered more than 385 million hits, continuing to attract between 250,000 and 500,000 hits per day. The campaign became the agency's most celebrated success story, helping Burger King to record its first string of positive growth quarters in a decade. For CPB, the account galvanized its reputation and delivered enormous financial growth, doubling the agency's annual billings.

KEY DATES

1965:: The agency is founded as Crispin Advertising.
1988:: Chuck Porter is hired as creative director.
1989:: Alex Bogusky joins the firm.
1990:: Porter is elected chairman of the agency and Bogusky is promoted to creative director.
1998:: The agency is awarded an anti-smoking campaign by the Florida Department of Health.
2001:: CPB is selected to develop a marketing campaign for the MINI Cooper.
2004:: Burger King Holdings, Inc. selects CPB as its advertising agency, doubling the agency's annual billings.
2005:: Volkswagen of America Inc. selects CPB as its advertising agency.

VOLKSWAGEN SIGNS ON: 2005

CPB celebrated its 40th anniversary enjoying the greatest success in its history. Each new account provided Bogusky and his creative staff with an opportunity to put a new spin on advertising, with each resulting marketing campaign serving as an example of the innumerable ways an advertiser could cultivate brand awareness. "No agency at the moment," SHOOT wrote in its December 2, 2005 issue, "seems to have such a prescient ability to navigate the ever-changing media landscape," referring to CPB, the recipient of its agency of the year award in 2005. Owners of the most prestigious brands in the corporate world took note of the agency's achievements, and one such company, Volkswagen of American Inc., turned to CPB in 2005. The agency resigned from its account with MINI USA to take on the $400 million contract, which eclipsed Burger King as the largest project in the agency's history. The campaign featured caricatures of a German dominatrix and engineer, but, oddly for CPB, the most prominent aspect of the agency's work for Volkswagen was a television commercial that began airing in 2006. The commercial featured a driver and a passenger engaged in a conversation abruptly and shockingly ended by a collision with another vehicle, leading to the tagline "Safe Happens."

As CPB plotted its future course, the agency's actions promised to change the way advertisers developed marketing campaigns. The success of its creative work for the American Legacy Foundation, MINI USA, Virgin Atlantic, Burger King, and Volkswagen, among other accounts, demonstrated the effectiveness of Bogusky's strategy, encouraging him to experiment further with the relationship between an agency and a client. In mid-2006, he took another step into uncharted territory when he announced CPB was developing its own movie, a movie in which the principal characters lived in an apartment above a Burger King restaurant. CPB, which was attempting to sell the script to 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, negotiated with Burger King to receive a percentage of the box office receipts, another first for an advertising agency. Clients usually owned the creative work developed by its agency, but CPB was changing the way agencies were compensated as well. In the years ahead, CPB's innovations promised to redefine the advertising industry, as the maverick agency explored new ways to foster brand awareness through all types of media.

Jeffrey L. Covell