Alex Bogusky used to race motorcycles, now he's helping Americans motor, MINI style. He's also telling people it's okay to get rid of their crap furniture and that, really, the tobacco companies are lying to you. In short, he and Miami agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, where he's the creative director and partner, are busy making a mark on popular culture.

For 39-year-old Bogusky, born, raised and still living in Miami, advertising is the family business. Both his parents were graphic designers, yet he never intended on becoming an adman. He got into the game, working at Miami agency Ryder&Scheild and then in his own design shop, after his mother advised him that if he learned to do mechanicals (paste ups), he'd always have a job.

While mechanicals are obsolete, Bogusky and his role in the industry are anything but. Schooled more through astute observations of trends than in the classic tenets of advertising (his formal education ended with Miami Senior High), he's used his gut instinct to apply American culture to the agency's work since chairman and partner Chuck Porter brought him on board in 1988 as senior art director.

The results have been tremendous. The agency's guerrilla work for Florida Truth in 1999 made headlines and collected the agency joint ownership with Boston's Arnold Worldwide over the American Legacy Foundation's national Truth Campaign. Its North American work for Ikea has helped vault the once-flailing brand to near-iconic status. And with the North American launch of MINI in 2002, well, Bogusky and crew are pretty much responsible for getting Americans to drive small cars. Go figure. Add to that a recent Grand Prix at Cannes for Ikea and the Best of Show and Advertiser of the Year at the One Show for MINI, and CP+B is the agency on the tip of everyone's lips.

But for Bogusky, who was named CD in 1993 and made partner alongside Porter, president Jeff Hicks and director of account services Jeff Steinhour in 1997, it's not the awards that are important; it's the people he works with. On the good ship CP+B, impressing each other holds more stock than outward appearances.

Bogusky says work at the agency is fun - if hard - but that's not on account of creative shop mainstays such as pool tables and slushie machines. "People see skateboards and think that has something to do with how our agency is run. It has nothing to do with it," says Bogusky. "We don't have things like a pool table because what we do is fun. How could you take a break from what we do to play?"

Part of the fun comes from what employees have called a 'democratic' work environment, which Bogusky works hard at fostering. "It's like we're one team that works on everything instead of separate teams doing their own thing." In fact, there's even a section of the New Employee Handbook entitled Jumping On Hand Grenades that explains, "Our unwritten policy has always been to drop what we are doing when someone needs our help. The person you help today may be the person you need to help you the day a hand grenade rolls into your office."

It seems like pie-in-the-sky talk that everyone should genuinely get along in an all-for-one fashion, but Bogusky's dead serious. When asked what he does as the creative steward of the shop when the nastier elements of human nature take hold of someone in times of stress, he replies flatly: "Fire them.

"To be good at hiring you have to be good at firing," he says. "It's fun to come to work. No one wants to let that get fucked up because one individual can't play nice." But he's quick to add that he doesn't actually fire that many people. Rather, he's just "super-paranoid" about who he hires.

This viewpoint explains why Bogusky feels his primary role within the agency is to build relationships - both within and without. As CD he acts as a divining hand, making and breaking creative teams, and as he says, playing marriage counselor when there's trouble in paradise.

The marriage analogy applies to client relationships as well. Bogusky touts a 100%-honesty philosophy when it comes to clients, saying that mutual respect and forthrightness are the only ways to a successful marriage. But more than that, he says he loves the pitch process, which he equates to dating, because it gives each party a chance to get to know each other before committing long term.

Bogusky laughs when asked if he thinks he inspires people. "No, never," he replies, but promptly contradicts himself by saying: "When people come in and are struggling, doing traditional stuff, I'll throw out a ridiculous idea to show them we're open to things they're not looking at."

Bogusky also counts 'bar placement', or determining the level of acceptable work, as another one of his duties. But rather than place lofty unattainable ideals, he sets lofty attainable standards. "You can't make the bar so high that nothing can achieve it. And you can't lower it for one without lowering it for everybody."

It seems there's been no problem with the bar's placement at Crispin. The shop has consistently churned out top-shelf work - for Truth, MINI and Molson Canadian, as well as lesser-known accounts like bike brand Shimano, FX Network and Fine Living Network - and has enjoyed new business wins such as the recent Virgin Atlantic account.

Despite the perception of a recent flurry of success, Bogusky says he's as proud of the shop's early work as he is of the current crop, and says that the 150-person, approximately $250-million US agency operates in exactly the same way as when it was a 40-person shop with $1-million accounts.

"In the last five years or so we were lucky enough to get clients with budgets that exposed more people to the philosophy we were using from the beginning," he says.

Bogusky says the grassroots-type of work done in the early days influenced some of the approaches on Truth and MINI. With Truth beginning in 1999, he says they were able to experiment with ideas and executions that skirted convention, and the MINI launch was "the first time we were able to translate that learning into a traditional consumer product".

Success, asserts Bogusky, is a strange thing in that it falls prey to popular definition. "We have such a narrow view of success in our society and a lot of it is connected to money," he says, noting that being in a creative field - "assuming advertising is a creative field" - often requires making decisions contrary to those that make sense financially. "You make decisions and somewhere along the line they turn into monetary returns, and suddenly everyone thinks you're successful."

For Bogusky, success came with CP+B's first account wins and every subsequent milestone along the way. "It feels so bad to me that this is the only definition for success; I would hate to just now feel successful."

FUN FACTS
Best at: Ignoring people.
Pet peeve: Plastic utensils and styrofoam plates.
Nickname: Never had one.
First date: Junior high prom.
First ad completed: A Del Monte cantaloupe trade ad. Headline: "Get a load of these melons."
First record: "Here Comes the Sun", The Beatles.
First career: Motorcycle racer, from ages 15 to 21.
Never thought he'd own: A house.
Dream car: What else? A MINI Cooper S.
When he gets a tattoo: "Some sort of dragon on my neck."
On memorable ads: "Every now and then someone does something that makes you think, 'Wow, that's what advertising can be'. It's very rare."
Childhood ads that made him think "Wow": Pizza Hut and a Honda scooter ad featuring Lou Reed.

WEBFILES: Crispin Porter + Bogusky> http://www.cpbmiami.com