Ruling The Roost

The past 18 months have been even hotter. The agency has landed an impressive roster of big-league mainstream clients that includes Burger King, Google, Gateway, and Gap, prompting jealous chatter on Madison Avenue about whether it can keep the streak going now that it's no longer dealing solely with cute little yuppie brands. For now, the Miami outfit continues to rack up more awards than it has space to display in its increasingly cramped offices, including being named Advertising Age's 2004 Agency of the Year.

The question everyone in the ad business is asking now: How do they do what they do?

It ain't pixie dust. And it's not even, particularly, the brilliance of any of the agency's four partners. (In addition to Bogusky, there's chairman Chuck Porter, president Jeff Hicks, and account-services director Jeff Steinhour. Sam Crispin founded the agency in 1965; his name is still on the door even though he departed in 1991 and his son, Charles, sold out in 1993.) Instead, a set of simple but insightful operating principles guides the agency at every level. When the shop is at its best, as it was with Subservient Chicken, it represents the very model of how an intelligent creative business should run.

Pick The Right Clients

CP+B says its process begins with picking "inspiring" clients. But that can be a little misleading when it comes to a client such as Burger King. After all, multibillion-dollar fast-food chains aren't typically known for wackiness or exuberant risk taking. In Burger King's case, inspiring was just another word for nothing left to lose.

After suffering a years-long slide, stuck in its perennial runner-up status, Burger King had little going for it other than the fact that it was still a nationally recognized brand. By December 2002, the chain's then parent company, Diageo PLC, was so desperate to sell it that it dropped Burger King's $2.4 billion asking price by a Whopper-sized $1 billion. The Texas Pacific Group, a hard-charging leveraged buyout firm with a Texas-sized appetite for troubled properties (it also owns controlling stakes in J.Crew and Continental Airlines), gobbled up the company, figuring that at least its real-estate holdings and franchisee fees would be worth something.

"We brought CP+B in without a review because we were, and still are, operating at a turnaround pace," says Russ Klein, who was hired by Texas Pacific as Burger King's chief marketing officer (its eighth in nine years). That's a sanitized version of what others said at the time -- namely that a radical campaign from CP+B was the company's last hope.

From CP+B's perspective, Burger King doubled the agency's billings overnight to more than $500 million -- and instantly catapulted it into a new level of high-stakes competition. In essence, the two Miami neighbors each made a bet-the-company gamble on the other that would test both organizations' appetite for risk. The game isn't decided yet, but play is shifting decidedly in Burger King's favor: Since CP+B took over the account in January 2004, Burger King's sales not only stopped a 21-month slide but actually turned around. Sales growth for the company in 2004 came in at an estimated 18.2% compared to McDonald's Corp.'s 11.3% (though Mickey D's is almost twice as large).

Build A Strategic Platform

At the center of CP+B's new marketing effort for Burger King lies a long-retired 30-year-old slogan, "Have It Your Way," which the agency dusted off as a way to pitch customizable fast food to a mass audience of 18-to-35-year-old men. But "Have It Your Way" is no mere tagline, as people inside and outside the agency will quickly tell you. It's a screening tool that, as much as possible, is used to guide every creative decision about the account.

At most agencies, strategy restrains creativity. At CP+B, disciplined thinking gives license to work that can be extreme.

Chris Rossi, the vice president of marketing and sales for Virgin Atlantic Airways, says the strategic thinking that CP+B bakes into its creative work is the key to its brilliance. Of course, every ad shop that hopes to stay in business would say it blends creativity and strategy. The difference is that at most agencies, strategy tones down creativity. ("Just say the brand name over and over until they can't get it out of their minds.") At CP+B, disciplined strategic thinking often provides a license for work that is, by any measure, extreme.

For Virgin Atlantic, for example, the agency launched a controversial spot this past fall on LodgeNet, a pay-per-view movie service carried in hotels throughout the world. After CP+B's media department discovered that business passengers gravitate to LodgeNet's adult section, CP+B produced a nine-and-a-half-minute spoof of a soft-core video (no nudity) called "Suite and Innocent." Next to Subservient Chicken, it has been one of CP+B's most talked-about works this year, drawing within three months 800,000 hotel viewers, who watched on average for a full seven and a half minutes. (Read into that whatever you will.)