One last South Beach sunset: Crispin Porter + Bogusky will close flagship Miami office in 2018
CP+B announced that it will close its Miami location in 2018, splitting its accounts among its US and global offices.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky will spend one last winter in Miami as it closes its flagship office in March 2018.
The months leading to the closure will be spent winding down and relocating operations. Aside from being its first office, Miami was also its smallest location—its accounts will be split between the Boulder, Los Angeles and São Paulo.
The announcement affects 75 employees in total, mostly in finance and accounting. Those functions will be centralized in Boulder, where other employees are being offered relocation to other CP+B offices. This includes executive creative director Tom Adams, who will be moving to CP+B LA.
Parent company MDC Partners will be assisting CP+B on identifying positions within the network for affected employees, and additional full-service support measures have been put in place.
CP+B Brazil’s leadership team of chief executive officer/partner Vincius Reis and co-chief creative officers/partners Marcos Medeiros and Andre Kassu (who helped bring the Miami office’s mojo back) will continue their roles and responsibilities for CP+B Brazil.
"We're really growing rapidly, really remarkably in São Paulo—that office is just exploding," CP+B chairman Chuck Porter said, "and there's just so much opportunity. The smartest thing for us to do in Brazil was to focus on the opportunities in Brazil."
Some of their clients were migrating to both Brazil and LA, and Porter believed, "to take away from that doesn't make sense."
Global chief executive Erik Sollenberg addressed the closure: “The DNA of CP+B centers around incredibly talented people doing extraordinary things. It’s our obligation to our employees and our clients to create and maintain an environment where this can happen. As we recommit to our core philosophies and reassess our structure, we have made the difficult decision to close our Miami office. While the official date is a few months away, we believe it is important to share the news now. This way, we can help each of our Miami people find a new situation for the coming year, whether it is within CP+B or beyond.”
Porter also spoke on the closure and what it means for the agency network.
"We have a lot of sentimental attachment here, cause it's been in our DNA. But, Miami has been our smallest office in the US for a long time. It got to the point it's not a good thing for the agency to diffuse ourselves over three offices. We finally came to the conclusion to consolidate. It's gonna be better financially, but—more importantly—it's going to be better creatively. More resources and enthusiasm in the places where were growing."
This move, which Porter says "obviously wasn't an overnight thing," comes on the heels of a number of recent and significant steps for CP+B, including the hiring of Sollenberg, who spent 14 years as chief executive of Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors, with whom CP+B has a global strategic partnership. In October, Linus Karlsson joined Sollenberg as global chief creative officer, who most recently founded MING Utility and Entertainment Group, and previously held executive posts at McCann Worldwide, and co-founded Mother New York.
At least there'll be one last winter in Miami for Crispin.