Hasta La Creative!

CP+B Miami named three new creative directors with the hiring of Juan Perez and the promotions of Alvaro Ramos and Jeff Siegel.

Ramos and Siegel have worked as a creative team at CP+B Miami for the past year and a half, working with brands including Vonage, Ryder, Mission 22, Santa Margherita and letgo as associate creative directors, following Siegel’s arrival from Energy BBDO. With Energy BBDO, Siegel served as vice president, associate creative director and worked with clients including Wrigley, Lay’s Quaker, Ziploc and Raid. He previously spent time with agencies including Cole & Weber and Publicis. Ramos arrived at CP+B Miami around four and a half years ago, following nearly four and half years with The Vidal Partnership, working with clients including Sprint, Cadbury Adams, Rémy Martin and the Ad Council. Before that he served in art director roles for agencies including 180 Amsterdam, BBDO, Leo Burnett and FCB. 

“Alvaro and Jeff have been stars here for a while,” CP+B chairman Chuck Porter said in a statement. “They’re not just serious talents, they never quit – they have the passion and drive that it takes to actually get good work produced. And Juan, well, he made himself so valuable during his freelance stint that we just had to get him here for real. This is all really good news for Miami and for CP+B.”

Perez joins CP+B full-time after a period as a freelance creative director and art director with CP+B’s Los Angeles office, after a year as a group creative director and art director with Grupo Gallegos, working with brands including Mitsubishi, Comcast, Valvoline and JCPenney. Prior to that he spent two years as co-executive creative director and art director at Blitz in Los Angeles, where he worked with brands such as Naked Juice, CiCi’s Pizza and Mirage Resort & Casino. That followed two years as a creative director/art director with Siltanen + Partners, working with brands including Yakult, Skechers, Kindle and Suzuki. Before that he spent a year as vice president, executive creative director with Mullen, working on brands such as DSW Shoes and T.J.Maxx, after three years as senior vice president, group creative director/art director with Energy BBDO, working with such clients as Wrigley and Jim Beam.

MDC Partners has acquired Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors, which will in turn form a “strategic global partnership” with CP+B.

At least we assume that’s the news. The press release does not include the word “acquisition” and mentions nothing about what portion of the agency MDC will own. It does, however, note the newly empowered network’s plan to unleash “an arsenal of extraordinary creative talent” by giving CP+B access to international staffers.

F&B is, of course, best known for the 2013 “Epic Split” campaign for Volvo Trucks starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. This past December Volvo designated Forsman & Bodenfors as its global strategic creative agency, and recent work for the client includes the “Prologue” launch spot for its “Made in Sweden” campaign, arriving ahead of the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament and starring Sweden national team captain Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Last September, the agency also teamed up with Iggy Pop in a spot for  H&M called “Close the Loop.”

Since its 1986 inception, the agency has grown to a team of 300, led by CEO Erik Sollenberg and chairman Anna Qvennerstedt. 

“I love Forsman & Bodenfors,” said CP+B chairman Chuck Porter, in a statement. “They only care about great work, and we share so much DNA they’re like our twin who grew up in Sweden. This business always needs re-invention and I think amazing things will come out of this partnership.”

“What we are creating is a fresh, seamless way to tap into the most potent collection of creative talent in the world,” added CP+B global CEO Lori Senecal. “At CP+B we’re building a modern global model that challenges the conventions of legacy agencies.  What ultimately makes us most valuable to global marketers is creating the boldest most inventive ideas that deliver the highest return on creativity, and this partnership amplifies our mission to do that more consistently and brilliantly than ever before.”

On Friday, employees of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky received an internal memo confirming that President Steve Erich would be leaving the agency after more than a decade.

While we don’t have that memo on hand, we do have a statement from CEO Andrew Keller:

“After over 11 years with CP+B, most recently as President/Partner, Steve Erich, has decided to leave the agency to pursue new opportunities. During Steve’s tenure, he helped lead the agency to unprecedented growth and success. We remain great fans and friends and look forward to seeing what he will achieve next.”

Erich, who worked in various accounts/management positions at TBWA and The Martin Agency before joining Crispin in 2004, began there as a director on the Burger King business and worked his way up through the organization in subsequent years, earning partner status in 2008 amidst the shakeup caused by the departure of VP/CD Rob Strasberg (now with Doner). He was named to the managing director position in 2012.

In assuming the presidency last January, Erich replaced Jeff Steinhour, who was promoted back in 2010 in the same move that made Keller CEO and Rob Reilly CCO. Steinhour took the vice chairman title while Erich was tasked with running the agency’s five offices and focusing on new business development.

Erich wasn’t not the only high-level employee to leave the CP+B team last week: Angel Anderson, who served as VP/experience director, also left to pursue new opportunities (at least one of which is her startup NailSnaps, Inc.). EVP/executive tech director Dan Fox left his position earlier in the week; tipsters tell us that his resignation stemmed in part from a gradual downsizing of Crispin’s in-house tech department. Former record company executive Mike Saunter, who became COO around the same time that Erich got his promotion, also left the agency approximately two months ago.

It would seem that Lori Senecal, the president/CEO of parent company MDC Partners who was also appointed to the global CEO position at Crispin in March, is following the lead of newly promoted executives on the client side who choose to shake up their executive teams and agency rosters in the interest of refreshing their organizations.

No word at the moment on Crispin’s plans to fill any of the newly open positions mentioned above.

Though we cannot confirm specifics at this time, sources close to the matter tell us that the Los Angeles offices of Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently won a pitch to create work for Elon Musk’s other crazy venture, PayPal.

The online payment service recently split with eBay, and earlier this year its revenues overtook those of its parent company for the first time. While the company did not publicly announce a review, we hear that Crispin’s West Coast office pitched and won some portion of the business last month. PayPal’s PR firm did not directly respond to our queries and an agency spokesperson referred us to “the client,” which would be a very odd statement if the two parties are not in fact working together.

You may recall that the company’s very first domestic ads, which debuted in 2012, starred Jeff Goldbum; they were created by Publicis & Hal Riney.

Havas Worldwide won the global creative account back in 2014 and created PayPal’s first international campaigns, which ran in Australia and Europe last May. The company also worked with Kansas City’s Muller Bressler Brown, which went on to work with its then-parent company as well.

PayPal’s most recent campaign “People Rule,” which popped up all over the New York subway system last year, was created by Havas Worldwide New York in collaboration with the animators at Studio 6 and sound design studio Antfood.

Based on the company’s past and present relationships with its creative agencies, we assume that any forthcoming work from Crispin will run domestically.

Updates when we get them.

CP+B created a PSA campaign for Mission 22, an initiative the agency created to deal with the issue of veteran suicide, whose name refers to the sad statistic that 22 veterans commit suicide in America every day.

“War At Home” aims to deliver the message that “Suicide, not war, is now the leading cause of death in the military” through an online video and a series of print ads running in magazines including Esquire, Fortune and Money. For the project, CP+B collaborated with veteran war photographer David Guttenfelder, who took photos of the homes where veterans committed suicide, with messages like “Ryan Clapper died on this battlefield six thousand miles from Iraq.” The campaign drives traffic to the Mission 22 website, which aims not just to raise awareness but to provide a list of resources for veterans who need help. It’s an arresting campaign that can hopefully not only bring the issue to light in an attention-grabbing way, but help veterans find the proper channels to deal with the lingering mental health issues caused by combat. The video above provides more of a look at Guttenfelder and the creation of the campaign, and head over to Adweek for a more in-depth look at the print ads.

CP+B Scandinavia took a unique approach to its latest campaign for Boxer, a Swedish TV channel provider.

Here’s the angle: the client currently offers customers a “bundle” of 16 channels as a subscription package. When faced with such a choice, the less decisive among us will often stall for time due to that old reliable–fear of commitment.

With Boxer, however, subscribers can change the channels in their bundle at any time. Therefore, the client will eliminate the hard choices and the “eeeehhhhhhhhhhh.”

It’s somehow both brilliant and infuriating, but you can’t quite ignore it–so it’s something like a Taylor Swift song.

The full spot, which will (ironically?) not run on cable, was directed by Oskar Bård & Carl Sundemo of Stockholm’s Hobby Film.

Today we learned that Best Buy — longtime client of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky — will follow a string of big-name companies like Chobani and FIAT Chrysler in abandoning the creative agency of record model and working instead with various shops on a by-project basis.

This means that CP+B will no longer be the client’s AOR.

From a Best Buy spokesperson:

“This is part of broader changes to our marketing strategy and it is consistent with moves we have made in other areas of the business.

Some marketing work will be consolidated and other pieces will be brought in-house. We will continue to have agency support, but it will be focused on specific projects.”

Best Buy had this to say about the agency itself:

“[CP+B] has been a great partner and they are [welcome] to bid on future projects.”

So the relationship between agency and client will not end immediately and the former may indeed work with the latter on future projects. Best Buy’s campaigns for the Summer and Back to School seasons will be led by CP+B and run as scheduled, but these efforts will be the last to list Crispin as the client’s agency of record.

Crispin initially won creative duties for Best Buy’s Geek Squad promos, working on that account long before they brought Bieber and Ozzy together for Super Bowl XLV. In 2007, the agency won more work at the expense of BBDO and eventually became Best Buy’s creative AOR; its most recent BB campaign to appear on this blog was a Rushmore-inspired back to school ad that ran last July.

A source tells us that the client has already begun issuing the RFPs in question and that AKQA is one of the winning agencies.

Both CP+B and AKQA refrained from commenting on this story.

Today we learned that two longtime Crispin staffers will be moving on.

David Corns, currently VP/director of product and brand invention at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, will leave the agency after nearly nine years to lead accounts at San Francisco’s Venables Bell & Partners.

Allie Cole, Crispin’s “senior cultural anthropologist/planner,” will also leave for an undisclosed position at Boulder/SF digital shop EVB (which AdAge recently called an “agency to watch” for 2015).

Corn’s July 2014 promotion to the invention role inspired some lightly raised eyebrows among our readers. At the time, the agency told us that he would assist in its in-house efforts to “create products, brands and companies from scratch” by “hiring industrial designers and other staff members and taking on new projects.”

In what some may see as an amusing twist given the recent work of Alex Bogusky, one of the first products to come out of that experiment in innovation was “Kraft Mac and Cheese for the grill.”

Prior to joining CP+B in 2006, Corns managed accounts for Carmichael Lynch as well as the London offices of TBWA and Wieden+Kennedy; at Crispin, he handled Burger King, Applebee’s, and more in addition to promoting the agency’s own products Papa’s Pilar rum and Angel’s Envy bourbon.

Cole, who joined the agency in 2010, was billed as “cognitive anthropologist” in recent campaigns for clients like Fruit of the Loom and A1 Steak Sauce.

We do not have specifics on titles or responsibilities for either party at the moment as none of the three agencies involved have offered comment.