The Rant: You Know, There Was Life Before CP&B

By / January 7, 2009 /

Volume 19 In a Series By Felix

Advertising has its iconic agencies. We praised the brave new world of Doyle Dane Bernbach; we marveled at the excesses of Saatchi & Saatchi; we wondered if anyone would come along to rival Deutsch. And now, it seems, everyone is worshiping at the Crispin Porter & Bogusky church.

Personally, I don’t put any of the latter agencies in the same league as the original DDB. Bernbach’s agency turned advertising on its head, making enormous leaps that revolutionized an industry. From the creation of art director/copywriter teams, to “selling a German car to Jews,” DDB’s work, and ethos, from the 50s, 60s and 70s is often copied to this day.

At this point, I hear mutterings of discontent. “It’s not fair to compare and contrast CP&B with DDB. Different time, different place.” But why not? If you’re going to put Crispin on this massive pedestal, they also deserve to be put under a microscope, too. It seems quite fair to look at what they have done, and are doing, and whether CP&B’s work will stand the test of time.

Has CP&B produced a campaign that’s on par with the original Volkswagen work? Has CP&B ever refused to work with a client until they fundamentally improved their business model, so that the advertising claims were completely genuine? Has CP&B created a revolution in advertising to rival DDB’s?

I hear people tell me all the time that CP&B is not just an ad agency, it’s a cultural phenomenon. And yes, I love their work. They do some great, great advertising and they usually embrace the Bernbach spirit of focusing on the product or service. But they’re not alone, and they’re certainly not new.

Take a British agency that, for a time, was THE agency everyone (including myself) wanted to work at. Not just that, but it was the agency clients mentioned in the board rooms of every other agency in the UK. “Why can’t you do something more edgy, like THEM?” I’m referring to Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), which launched over 20 years ago in 1987 – two weeks after the ’87 Wall Street Crash.

The founding partners of HHCL wanted to do a different kind of advertising (hardly surprising after the crash). More interested in selling the product than winning awards, they were constantly pushing boundaries and making consumers sit up and take notice. They were smart, savvy, intelligent, irreverent and could not be touched. They were advertising rock stars.

Their work was unorthodox and ultra-creative. They were visionaries, whose work on products like Tango, Maxell, the AA, First Direct and Pot Noodle earned them a place in British (and to an extent, International) advertising history.

HHCL was also responsible for many firsts, not dissimilar to those of DDB. The entire company, and the work they produced, organized itself around project teams: an account director, strategic planner and creative team were responsible for creating the work. This may be how it’s done today in many places, but not back in 1987.

The idea of complete integration is nothing new today either, but HHCL was at the front line of offering above and below the line advertising and PR.

Clients were invited to tissue sessions. And “hot desking” was employed, so that agency employees of different skills sat next to each other. It wasn’t unusual to have an accountant working opposite a copywriter and art director. HHCL produced its own in-house TV show, The Howell Henry Show. HHCL had a futurologist and a shaman on staff.

Want more? They were the first agency to run two ads concurrently on two different channels. They broke out of the mold, putting ads on everything from Tube tickets to pavements, and thus forging the way for the guerrilla work now commonplace in most agencies. They were the first to put a web address on a commercial. They created the infamous Mazda campaign, which asked viewers to record the ad and play it back in slo-mo (it bombed by the way). They did it all, and did a lot of it first.

I could go on, but you get the picture. And other agencies followed in their footsteps, including St. Luke’s and Mother (who would later win clients from HHCL).

Where are HHCL now? Gone. Like all young upstarts with revolutionary ideas, the bigger they became, the more big clients they acquired, and the more mainstream they were forced to become. They eventually became establishment figures, being bought out and merged a few times before WPP Group put the final nail in the coffin in 2007.

Compare this story to CP&B. How much of it sounds vaguely familiar? Astounding work on BMW Mini, VW’s Safe Happens, and the unforgettable Subservient Chicken. Upstarts of advertising. Creative rock stars. You name it, if CP&B have been called it, I guarantee HHCL were called the same thing 20 years ago. CP&B also seems to be their own PR machine. They want the press; they want all of the shiny awards; they want to publish books and TV shows; hell, they’ll probably have a record deal soon.

And yet, I already see the mountainous CP&B showing cracks in its armor, albeit tiny ones. Several of their recent “big” ideas were recycled, either from themselves or other work. The BK wallets idea was done by McDonald’s, and a few years ago, Carlsberg Lager dropped money all over the streets of London. The taste test continues to get the CP&B treatment, first with Whopper Virgins and now a similar execution for Domino’s. In fact, check out the annuals and take a look at work by KresselsKramer, Goodby or BBH. You’ll see striking similarities, even in the phrasing Bogusky uses to speak to the press. And I don’t know many people who were really impressed or swayed by the $300 million Microsoft work, which was schizophrenic and often self-indulgent.

Meanwhile, agencies like Fallon, Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein, BBDO, DDB and others continue to pump out great work without feeling the need to be a rock-star agency with perfect hair and an obsession with being cool.

In the end, it’s all about “The Work. The Work. The Work.” And that didn’t come from Alex Bogusky by the way, but BBDO’s Phil Dusenberry.

There. I said it.

But I’ll still take a job at CP&B. I’m just mad…not insane.