Crispin Porter+Bogusky's Chuck Porter Assesses Creative Web Challenges
By Robert Goldrich
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. --For agency creatives and marketers, the daunting challenge in interactive, said Chuck Porter, co-chairman, Crispin Porter+Bogusky (CP+B), Miami and Boulder, Colo., is simply that “it’s easier than ever [for prospective consumers] to shut you off.” On the flip side, he noted, it’s also “easier than ever [for audiences] to fall in love with you. If you engage them…they can and will make the effort to find out all about you online.”
Of that double-edged sword, Porter affirmed, “I’ll take that trade-off every time because it benefits the storytellers.”
Porter shared those observations during his keynote address at the Online Media, Marketing & Advertising (OMMA) Global Conference & Expo held last week in Hollywood.
One of the “holy grails,” he said, is people liking your online content enough to send it to friends. Free viral exposure is nirvana and a dynamic of prime importance in the science of online communication and marketing. And it’s a dynamic that’s dependent on “the power of the story,” he continued, noting that good stories are “entertaining, and “sometimes bigger than life”–they have to be, stressed Porter, in the brave new media world.
A Boulder approach
So for Porter, given that storytellers are essential, the key ingredient more than ever for an ad agency is “creative talent–getting it and keeping it.”
That’s why CP+B opened an office in Boulder, to offer its young creatives a lifestyle distinctly different from that of Miami. “How do you keep talent?” asked Porter who cited such factors as more money and a better dental plan. He then dismissed the latter, noting that hot young 23-year-old creatives all have good teeth and don’t care about a dental plan.
Thus CP+B sought out a locale for a second office that was “the most opposite of Miami you could find.” Boulder offers an outdoor lifestyle and other social aspects that have proven attractive to some creatives. Now they have a choice between Miami and Boulder, giving them extra incentive to stay at CP+B.
Rage against machine OMMA organizers asked Porter in his keynote remarks to address whether or not creatives can “tame the machine.” In this case, the machine for online campaigns can mean creative becoming subservient to the algorithms of ad-servers, keyword and copy optimization tools, click rates and ROI computations.
“Good stories don’t come from machines,” Porter said in identifying one of his basic tenets of advertising and marketing. He cited as an example CP+B’s recent “Whopper Freak-out” campaign for Burger King in which customers are up in arms when they are told that BK has stopped selling their favorite burger, the coveted Whopper. The strategy of “let’s stop selling our most popular product” paradoxically turned out to be a smashing success for BK. “No machine, no software tool would have approved” this creative strategy,” said Porter, which underscores the integral part that inspired creative plays in effective marketing communication, generating off-the-chart positive results for clients.
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