• by John Capone , January 5, 2010

Many agencies are fond of saying they are digital at the core. Crispin Porter + Bogusky may make a claim further than this. It is social to the bone.

In the last year, besides winning kudos for the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook campaign and awards for twisted Whopper Freakout viral videos, CP+B auctioned its interns on eBay, came to the aid of client Dominos with a social media reaction when employees of the pizza chain posted a video that went viral in a very bad way, went out on a limb to crowd source one of its client's logos, and redesigned its own home page to be fully socially integrated. The page takes warts-and-all Twitter feeds, snapshots of CP+B and presence around the Web and a video player for a dynamic and constantly changing Web portal, which suits it.

Much of the credit for the agency's success must go to its much lauded (to the point of parody at times, it must be said) culture of creativity, but credit is also due the cogs in the machine or the senior cognitive anthropologists - "what we call 'cogs' and other people call planners," as Alex Bogusky cochairman of CP+B puts it.

Not every move the agency makes pays off with the home run of Whopper Sacrifice, but part of the recipe for success in the social media sphere is taking chances, which the agency has never been shy about.

The end of the year saw CP+B getting agency of the decade accolades and the publication of the book Baked In by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor (former executive director of strategy and product innovation at CP+B, who went on to form Victor and Spoils, a creative agency built on crowd sourcing principles). It also saw CP+B further taking to heart the idea of old-school social media internally, by completing the jobs tracking board, a giant ticker that constantly updates the status of all internal jobs in a place and on a scale that everyone in the company can see.