CP+B Icon Bogusky Quits MDC Partners

Ad industry icon Alex Bogusky is stepping down from MDC Partners to focus on projects outside the marketing world.

Bogusky helped solidify Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s reputation as probably the hottest U.S. creative shop over the past decade, exemplified by its sometimes creepy interactive concepts. Under his direction, the agency has produced such celebrated digital work as Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” and “Whopper Sacrifice,” anti-smoking campaign TheTruth.com, and Best Buy’s Twelpforce – essentially a customer service initiative – in 2009.

“We have enjoyed a long and tremendously productive partnership over the past ten years and have the utmost respect and admiration for Alex,” said a statement from MDC. “We’re confident that many important causes will benefit from his passion and brilliance, and wish him the very best in all of his future endeavors.”

Bogusky joined the agency as an art director in 1989, when it was called simply Crispin and Porter, made partner in 1997, and became co-chairman in 2008. Under his guidance, it won national accounts such as Burger King, Microsoft, Volkwagen, and Kraft.

Earlier this year, Bogusky stepped into a broader role at MDC Partners, whose other digital holdings include The Media Kitchen, Dotglu, Hello Design, and Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners.

This year at the Cannes Lions festival, CP+B was awarded interactive agency of the year for the third time in just five years. Jeff Benjamin, chief creative officer for the Boulder, CO-based agency, told ClickZ that Bogusky was in many ways a natural with digital creative ideas, despite his relatively advanced age.

“I’m convinced if he had come of age [a little later], he would have been an interactive guy,” Benjamin said.

Follow Zachary Rodgers on Twitter at @zachrodgers.