Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Crowdsourcing the creative

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a … Read more

The conversation wars

Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And now the world’s hottest advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), has done it, too: the NY outfit has re-launched its corporate web site as a conversational social hub that curates what is being said about CPB rather than staging what CPB has to say. Some may scoff at this move and denigrate it as “sooooo six months ago,” but I agree with Paul Isakson when he heralds the influence of the new CPB site on the rest of the industry as potentially paradigm-shifting.

The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early … Read more

The dark secrets of Whopper Sacrifice

SAN FRANCISCO--"I don't know how many of you actually got sacrificed out there, but condolences to you," said Matt Walsh, head of the Interaction Design department at ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, as he surveyed the audience at his Friday morning talk at the Web 2.0 Expo.

CP&B, after all, was the creator of the "Whopper Sacrifice" phenomenon, a Burger King ad campaign on Facebook that promised a coupon for a free hamburger if participants deleted 10 people from their friends lists on the social network. It was a wild … Read more

Gates-Seinfeld act 2: Beautiful minds?

Having bumped into each other at Shoe Circus, the two protagonists decide to walk the tightrope and make a road movie.

Whisper it very softly, but they just might pull this trick off.

Take a look at the 4.5-minute version of Gates and Seinfeld's "Road to Somewhere 2." In the first installment, the Kafkasesque "Shoe Circus," Jerry Seinfeld looked as if he had really forgotten how not to act, but in this second installment, it's hard not to warm to his buddy act with a new thespian who is clearly holding his own, … Read more

Gates outacts Seinfeld in 'Back to the Future'

Some people love it. Some people hate it.

Which is why Crispin Porter and Bogusky, the agency responsible for the otherworldly new Microsoft TV spot featuring the clowning Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, is already happy.

The first aim of any Crispin campaign is to get people talking about the ad. So it seems to be a success. The only real question is whether people outside of the tech world will be talking about it.

Naturally, those in the techie bubble think the work is aimed at them. However, it is really aimed at everyone out there whose warm feelings … Read more