Crispin Porter + Bogusky's A-Team. (Left to right) Winston Binch, Jeff Benjamin, David Rolfe, Rob Reilly, Andrew Keller, Scott Prindle and Matt Walsh

The New Oxford American Dictionary crowned “unfriend” its 2009 Word Of The Year, narrowly beating racier mots du jour “death panel” and “sexting”. The word’s cultural kudos was due in part, noted a number of bloggers and commentators, to Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook app created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, just one of a host of zeitgeist-tapping, endlessly innovative initiatives and great work that earned them our Agency of the Year honors.

While most agencies created advertising, CP+B strove for nothing less than making ripples in culture. The basic principle for their work – identifying cultural tensions and writing simple press releases for briefs – provoked, enraged and caused buzz; in short living up to its goal of making its clients famous.

The idea of earned media, a buzz word in the last year, has been a mantra at CP+B from the start. “What will the press say about this campaign? It’s not because we’re press whores… I guess we are,” laughs ECD and partner Andrew Keller. “But more importantly, is this something that someone is going to write about? Say Gap has a new TV campaign. Well, okay. Maybe advertising press will write about it, maybe, but will the New York Times or USA Today or bloggers write about it? Sometimes I’ll say: we buy media, but that’s only half the media buy, we have to activate the other half of the media buy.”

Much of what the agency produced was simple, yet designed to provoke fame or, equally, infamy: Whopper Virgins took BK’s burgers to the remotest parts of the world, and pundits cried culinary imperialism. BK’s live online polygraph of Nascar driver Tony Stewart made celebrity endorsements interesting again. The massive and ubiquitous I’m a PC Microsoft campaign divided the chattering classes, yet undoubtedly made PCs personal and took the battle back to Apple. Electric motorcycle brand Brammo piggybacked on outrage at the travel excesses of automotive CEOs, its founder blogging his journey to Washington to highlight alternative power sources. The cumulative column inches would make a PR exec swoon.

Then there was a host of consistently creative TV work – Hulu’s launch, BK’s School of Endorsements, Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters – that all seemed to cut to the chase of an insight and create an interesting twist on it. They also matured: “I think the agency has come into its own a little bit. [We have] a style of work that has evolved to be more inclusive,” says ECD and partner Rob Reilly. “If you look at what the agency was doing five years ago with Truth, Mini and Burger King, we were thought of in a narrow sense. Now we have Microsoft, Gap and Old Navy, big global brands. That’s the challenge creatively: can we do what we’ve done for smaller clients on a global scale?”

Just ask one of the agency’s biggest brands: “What I think is so great when I work with Crispin is they have an incredible reductionist approach to briefs, really getting down to core essentials, which when given to creatives will keep them focused,” says Gayle Troberman, general manager of consumer engagement and advertising, Microsoft.

The ethos of transparency that ran through all of CP+B’s work uncannily reduced the zeitgeist of the last year to the collective issue of trust. All of the above work honed in on real people and/or experiences, reflecting in many ways the fact that brands are defined by the reviews, comments and opinions of consumers on the web. “Transparency is something we preach all the time,” agrees Reilly. “I think consumers want to be involved more with the creation of brands and there’s a level of transparency that has probably never been seen before.” They practice what they preach too. Earlier this year the agency relaunched its website as a mirror of how the web, and hence consumers, perceive Crispin and their clients, warts and all. That included losing the VW account and weathering the furor of the design community after crowdsourcing the Brammo logo.

Transparency is just one hugely important insight born of the agency’s cultural anthropologists – affectionately called cogs. They work alongside creatives and technologists (introduced long before most other agencies had) – as well as, where necessary, product designers, interaction and interactive designers among others. All of them are deeply integrated to collectively dream up multi-platform campaigns that cleverly marry technology, behavior and strategy. “I always describe it as The A-Team,” says interactive ECD Jeff Benjamin. “For me when we’re doing it right, that’s what it feels like: you have these people who were locked in a garage with a fridge and a toothpick. The going was rough and somehow they turned that thing into a tank.”

That marriage bears out in the work. Whopper Sacrifice is the best social media campaign we’ve seen because it profoundly understands the human behavior at the heart of Facebook. Their new Coke Zero Facial Profiler is equally canny: a Facebook app that trawls photos you upload to the site to find your doppelganger. It’s brilliantly pitched, harnessing our narcissistic curiosity yet rooted in social media behavior and sophisticated homeland security software. Or their Best Buy Twelpforce initiative, which uses the company’s existing workforce as a real-time Twitter tech advice team.
Keller, Reilly and Benjamin all talk about experimentation as part of Crispin’s ethos with hiring, ideas, media and platforms, creative teams and projects, saying that it keeps them nimble, reflexive, flexible and up to date – no mean feat for an agency that now numbers 900-plus. “With the digital landscape changing so remarkably, not only every day but almost every hour, it’s really become a frontier with us to experiment with ways to engage consumers that we didn’t have at our disposal not even half a decade ago, but a year ago,” says Burger King’s VP marketing impact Brian Gies.

Some of the most exciting work in Adland this year blurred the boundaries of advertising and product. Winston Binch, VP/managing director of interactive, cites the agency’s recent work for B2B networking initiative American Express Open Forum as an example of their ambitions in that realm: “We still do a lot of digital advertising, and it has its place, but digital product development is a strategic direction we want to continue to head in with our clients. Delivering utility and value is just a lot more effective than delivering messages.”

Their acquisition of Daddy, an interactive agency in Sweden, bears out that commitment to innovation on a global scale going forward. “I think more and more clients are asking their agencies to raise the bar a little bit,” concludes Benjamin. “If I’m a client, why shouldn’t I expect an agency to come up with something like Facebook? Not an app on Facebook, but the next Facebook?”

With ambitions like that, don’t be surprised if in a marvel of meta marketing, 2010’s Word Of The Year features in The Microsoft New American Dictionary.

www.cpbgroup.com