Chuck and the Crispin Factory

On Thursday night, about 150 Minneapolis advertising folk gathered at Le Meridien (cool hotel) for the second leg of round 2 of the Battle for the HeArt. Headliner was none other than Chairman of CP+B, Chuck Porter (some say he put the Porter in Crispin, Porter + Bogusky)

First of all, I want to send a big shout out to my Twin Cities brothers and sisters. It was great to meet you all.

Here are some highlights from Chuck’s speech. In a nutshell, Chuck’s message was that creativity is creativity – no matter which form or definition you might choose to describe, outline or define it.

Bottom line, CP+B are the hottest agency in this country. Period. Why? What’s the secret? Is it the drinking water? Is it the fact no one answers their phones after 4pm because they’re all surfing? I believe that part of the solution lies in being far away from the madness, incestuousness (if that’s a word) and sameness of Madison Avenue. They just get on with it…

And of course, talent is key as well.

Back to Chuck. He mentioned that all the stats about fragmentation, clutter, DVR’s etc are actually good news…because they naturally promote and lead to flexibility, innovation and freshness of approaches and idea generation. “In a revolution, people get hurt,” said the Willy Wonka of the Ad Business…perhaps it’s because of the Greed passed down by the holding companies that forces so many agencies to plunge head-first into the chocolate (which actually turns out to be crap) river of their own esoteric egos?

Chuck let the work do the talking…he showed work for Burger King, IKEA, Mini and Google – all of which pay off strongly the notion of what I call “horizontal integration” and the fact that for this business to evolve, we need to move from being in the ad business to being in the experience business.

Here are some final sound bytes from his speech:

-         nobody wants to talk to a salesman

-         Invent media

-         Even when you’re the same, be different

-         By stuff that’s not for sale

Oh and then there was an insight (which Crispin used for Virgin Airlines) about how the average male that purchases adult movies in hotel rooms only spends 7 minutes watching the movie. Gee, why so short? And is it a coincidence that the average consumer spent 7 minutes interacting with Subservient Chicken? Whatever turns you on, big boy.