Is Crispin Porter + Bogusky a small source of profit for MDC, or a large one? After reading my article from yesterday (Why MDC Will Never Love an Ad Man Like It Loved Alex Bogusky), MDC CEO Miles Nadal e-mailed to dispute figures I’d been given by Deutsche Bank analyst Matt Chesler.

Aside from the twenty-four foot tall wooden box of Kraft Mac & Cheese hovering in Crispin Porter + Bogusky's foyer--its latest client win--there wasn't much indication that anything at the hottest ad agency in the country had changed. "It's no big deal, nothing's happened," Alex Bogusky reassured me a few weeks ago in Boulder, several months after ditching his chairman role at Crispin for a job upstairs as "Chief Creative Insurgent" of MDC Partners, Crispin's parent company. "There are 1,000 other people that work there."

Earlier today MDC Partners, the parent company of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (“ad agency of the decade,” according to Advertising Age), announced that Alex Bogusky, perhaps the most influential figure in American advertising today, has resigned from MDC. The announcement, in the form of an innocuous press release, shocked the ad world. Indeed, Bogusky told me this morning, "I have severed all ties with MDC and Crispin." Elvis has left the ad business.