Crispin Porter + Bogusky's staffers have put the ad agency's personal touch on its new Boulder County digs, a cavernous former health club in a Gunbarrel business park.

From the statue of P.T. Barnum's pygmy elephant to growing rows of new desks, the office has become home to 170 Miami transplants and another 40 new hires. The original South Florida headquarters still houses 390 co-workers who chose to remain.

But almost none of the office trappings in either spot is essential to getting the work done, said partner and Chief Creative Officer Alex Bogusky.

"I don't think agencies really exist - except for the people," he said. "If tomorrow, everybody here doesn't wake up in a good mood ready to do good work, we can be terrible."

So the two offices act as recruiting tools, as well as good-mood insurance, he said.

"If I can say to the best person I can find, you should come to --CP+B because you're going to enjoy the work, you're going to enjoy what you do, and you can choose between two different places to live and two different kinds of lifestyles, that's huge and that makes us more competitive in getting great people."

And whether they're in Florida or Boulder, they're clearly on the same team. Teams in Miami and Boulder work on the same accounts, mostly for the dozen or so national clients that keep the agency on retainer.

Workers rarely worry about going too far over the top.

"I don't mind spectacular failure or spectacular criticism," Bogusky said. "Those make the headlines, which means you're talking about it. There's so much advertising that nobody knows even exists, and people are spending millions of dollars on it. That's the stuff that I worry about making."

That philosophy has been put to the test a few times recently.

In commercials launched during the Golden Globes in January, technology and a famous movie director helped bring back a folksy popcorn icon from another era.

In a commercial for Orville Redenbacher popcorn, CP+B and movie director David Fincher (Fight Club, Alien 3, Panic Room) used technology to re-create the company's namesake, who died 12 years ago, in ads dubbed creepy and renamed Deadenbacher by some critics.

In his column, Advertising Age's Bob Garfield called the character the "first spokeszombie."

BusinessWeek columnist David Kiley compared him to "the waxworks version of abolitionist John Brown I saw at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., when I was a kid."

It's all good, as long as they're talking, Bogusky said.

As it turns out, popcorn sales are up, and the agency's ready to launch the next phase, in which Orville breaks out of the boring mold and does things only computer-generated characters can.

That's not always the way.

Last year, big buzz around CP+B's Miller Lite "man laws" campaign didn't translate into big beer sales. Miller has scrapped that campaign but kept the agency, which is working on new material.

Miller is one of three CP+B clients that annually ends up on Advertising Age's list of top 100 advertisers, spending more than $450 million on U.S. advertising. The other two are Burger King and Volkswagen.

And while the agency has begun working with Boulder-based Pearl Izumi, it was never the plan to hit Boulder to grab new business or local clients, Bogusky said.

"We usually keep accounts for a while, so the things we've had we hold onto. I guess our criteria is, they've got to be passionate marketers who believe in advertising and believe you can do amazing things with it."

A closer look

Some well-known clients of Crispin Porter + Bogusky:

• Burger King

• Miller Lite

• Volkswagen

• Orville Redenbacher, a ConAgra brand

• Haggar

Agency's growth:

1997 billings   $60 million

2002 billings   $215 million

2006 billings   $1 billion

Source: Crispin Porter + Bogusky

forgrievej@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5191

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