by Marcus Rebischini
Those were the words on a poster at a previous agency.
And that’s also what I took away from the Crispin Porter + Bogusky talk at this year’s Cannes Lions.
It’s about Patents. Products. Brands. All of which the agency owns.
As Andrew Keller put it, they wanted to make CP+B true equity partners in what they produced, with a seat at the decision-making table on their own brands. And the best part? All the profit came to them and their investors instead of just an agency fee. In gist, they aren’t following the agency norm.
It’s rather interesting as a few years back clients started to build their own in-house agencies. Sony was one of the first companies to do this. So it’s interesting to see agencies doing the exact opposite – building brands internally.
So back to the talk itself. “Angels Envy” Bourbon, probably CP+B’s most successful venture to date, was the highlight of their talk. Here’s a brand they built from the ground up and went on to sell it for more than 100 Million dollars a few years later to the drink giant, Bacardi. Chuck Porter was rather chuffed indeed about this fact.
What was also interesting about the talk is that so much of the work we see today is probably some new wiz bang technology that rules the idea or is a short lived one-off first thought. What I loved about the whole “Angels Envy” Bourbon section of the talk was CP+B were making something profitable but at the same time a product or more so an idea that will definitely live on for more than 11 years which most ideas/campaigns couldn’t dream of doing.
I hope Andrew Keller and his team will inspire you as much as they inspired me.
