An Ad Agency's Formula for Outrageous Creativity

Batting .300 in baseball is considered a good step toward Hall of Fame consideration. Crispin Porter + Bogusky chairman Chuck Porter credits that kind of hiring average with honing the agency’s winning edge.

“Historically over the past 20 years, about one out of every three people we thought were going to be great turned out to be great,” the 65-year-old Porter tells SUCCESS. “I’ve never worked with other agencies, so I hate to compare, but I think we do better than most.”

“Better than most” has enabled the outfit USA Today called “the ad world’s most talked-about agency” to grow from a wobbly Miami infancy more than 24 years ago into an influential, award-winning industry power, crowned Agency of the Decade by Ad Age in 2009. Its often-radical work—for clients from Burger King, Microsoft, Domino’s and The Gap to its groundbreaking Truth anti-smoking campaign—has made it a leading voice in the advertising world. (Porter is the last of the original nameplate. Crispin left the business in 1993. One of Porter’s most prolific hires was the brilliant Alex Bogusky, who Fast Company in 2008 labeled “the Steve Jobs of the ad world.” Bogusky retired in 2010.)

Ask the self-effacing Porter what makes him successful, and he’s quick to reply, “Hey, if you can figure that out, tell me, ’cuz I’d be interested in knowing that.” When pressed, he credits criteria born of necessity in the agency’s early days as the foundation for its ongoing success.

CP+B's Most Memorable Ad Campaigns

“I’ve always thought that all you can really do is come into the office and try to do something really brilliant today,” Porter says. “Forget about tomorrow or yesterday. Focus on doing something terrific or the very best you can do right now. I believed that when I first started. I never really said, ‘Here’s where I want to be in five years.’ It’s always been a very immediate thing. I have a dog trainer who told me a few days ago that dogs live in the moment. I thought about it, and said, ‘Frankly so do I.’ I believe if I do what I’ve been doing right now really great, everything else will take care of itself. I felt that way the day I started in this business, and I feel that way today.”

Porter allows that he believes pressure and friction create better work than relaxation, and staffers note an ever-present edginess pervades the shop. The agency’s website spells out its mantra this way: “CP+B is a factory. A factory that makes advertising, interactive, branded content and products. There is no assembly line. All the work is custom-designed and assembled by hand.”

Although he no longer does many agency interviews—he has talented, experienced people who handle that today—his early approach at CP+B was simple: Spend a lot of time talking with applicants, trying to assess whether someone is smart, talented, passionate or has that curious gene that makes them want to learn about things.

“This may sound like a cliché, but the biggest mistake you can make in recruiting talent is to look for someone who is not going to be a threat to you,” he says. “I think a lot of executives still do that. One thing I’ve always tried to do is assume everyone we hire is just as smart as I am and to treat them that way. From a managing perspective, we tend to say, “You’re just as smart as I am. Here’s the problem. Go solve it.” Most of the time people will surprise you by how good they are.”

He allows he tended “to surprise applicants more than they surprised me,” he says. “I would ask them questions that they really didn’t expect, like asking a really buttoned-up applicant what the average rainfall was in the Amazon Basin, as a way to assess people and how they react.

“You pay attention to what they’ve done, and what they’ve done in school. But in the end, those things are less important. I used to say our ideal candidate had high SATs and low GPAs. They tend to be underachievers in school who happen to be real smart. People whom we like and who succeed here tend to have a pretty good sense of humor and tend to take themselves not terribly seriously. They tend to be very curious, want to learn things and have a broad array of interests outside of work, even though they may work 80 hours a week.”

As it has grown dramatically, the agency also has tried to stay true to another practice born during its infancy—to promote from within unless it’s absolutely impossible.

“Periodically, it is impossible, and we have to go outside, but we try to find the people we need within the agency,” Porter says. “It’s on a case-by-case basis. We are expanding globally right now, and we don’t have anyone in our organization who has that experience and those contacts, so we’ve had to go outside to find the right people. When I no longer wanted to be president of the agency, at that point we had 50 people, and I didn’t think we had anyone inside who was the right person for the job. So I went outside and hired a guy who had just gotten his MBA. That remains a rare occurrence. Of the top people in our organization, however, the vast majority of them started here.”

During the 20-plus-year journey, those who have stayed the course have “learned humility,” Porter says. “We have a lot of smart people with a lot of very big egos. I don’t put all that much stock in experience, but one of the things experience does teach you in our business is a lot of times the other guy is right. One of the things we’ve learned over the past 20 years is maybe to listen a little harder and to allow that they might be right—that the way they think to solve a problem might indeed be the way to go. That’s made us a more mature, effective agency.”