Many agencies have a signature ad or TV spot, something that instantly conveys the essence of their style. For Hunt Murray, that defining moment was a screaming Australian lizard.

Not just any lizard, but a rare and "fearless" Australian frilled variety, discovered on stock nature footage, that would become an early mascot of sorts for Mystic Lake Casino, a Native American-owned gambling mecca in Prior Lake, Minn.

The award-winning commercial offers the implied wisdom that, compared with this creature, even slot players are "a lot luckier than you think."

A lizard is just about the last thing you'd expect to find in a casino ad, more likely the domain of leggy Vegas showgirls or Wayne Newton.

But the attention-getting device paid off, not just for the casino but for the Minneapolis agency.

"The direction I gave them was, `Dare to be different,"' says Nick Kootsikas, the former senior VP-marketing and public affairs for Mystic Lake, owned by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota tribe. "Some people were bewildered by them ... but they were talking about them, and that's what we wanted."

Minnesotans also talked about a heart-wrenching advocacy campaign, developed later by Hunt Murray, that attempted to combat a political backlash over Native American casino ownership fueled by a jealous hotel industry.

"Many of our employees come from a long line of Indian people," was the headline on one print ad, sporting a photo of an unemployment line. A TV spot captured an allegedly racist sentiment among whites, portraying several boys in a friendly Cowboys and Indians game in which no one wants to be the Indian.

But it was politics that ultimately spelled doom for the agency, for Mr. Kootsikas and the casino's chairman, tribal leader Leonard Prescott. All left Mystic Lake's employ late last summer, and a new marketing executive from (gasp!) Las Vegas was brought in.

He immediately asked for the very kind of ads that Hunt Murray had recoiled against, and said, "`We don't want any more work that people have to think about,"' recalls Patrick Hunt, Hunt Murray's shaggy-haired president. "It was patently ridiculous to abandon a campaign that as far as I'm concerned was unprecedented in its results."

So the agency, faced with the looming threat of a review anyway, refused to alter its effective approach and resigned Mystic Lake, which at $4 million was by far its largest account. (The business landed at Vegas shop EOR O'Sullivan.)

Hunt Murray's decision became a risky badge of honor.

"The financial stuff we can live with," Hunt says. "It's a lot harder decision to compromise your integrity."

That integrity-and Hunt Murray's creative reputation-remain intact, and the agency is hardly a one-horse shop. Earlier this month, it won 31 awards, topping all other entrants in the locally prestigious The Show competition.

However, 13 of those prizes were for Mystic Lake work. Now, the agency will seek another breakout client, even as executives suggest the distinct possibility of reuniting with the one that earned them fame.

"They will have some tests coming up," warns a vaguely patronizing Patrick Fallon, dean of the Twin Cities agency community and mentor to Patrick Hunt, "and we'll see if they have the courage and vision to do the right thing. If they win anything large, the microscope will be on them."

But they probably won't mind.

Mike Murray, an art major with a flair for typography and layout, early on was ambivalent about a career in advertising, which he viewed as "just a way to earn a paycheck." Eighteen years and nine agencies later, he'd toured most of the big-name Twin Cities outposts, including a failed satellite-office experiment by Young & Rubicam.

Ironically, one of the few shops Murray missed-Fallon McElligott-proved the only full-time agency experience for Hunt, who majored in finance at the University of Minnesota and says "divine intervention" (in the form of a rejection letter) saved him from becoming a banker.

Instead, Hunt spent a year as a Utah ski bum before starting a community newspaper for the area's ski resorts and tending bar. A fateful 1985 Salt Lake City adclub luncheon lured Hunt with the appearance of Fallon, who delivered his "Big Idea" speech on creativity.

After hearing it, Hunt found his religion. "I wanted it so bad my palms started sweating. I knew I had to do this."

He wound up back in Minneapolis as a Fallon account exec, working on a handful of clients ranging from Country Kitchen to U S West and Federal Express Corp.

It was FedEx that drew Hunt and Murray together in 1989, when Murray's agency, Blaisdell & Westlie, shared a piece of the account with Fallon.

Both say they outgrew their jobs, worked elsewhere and then hooked up again on the free-lance circuit, where Hunt started the Hunt Consortium, a talent co-op pool, and Murray did his own projects.

The duo eventually joined forces in the fall of 1991 to pitch Mystic Lake, which at the time was little more than a bunch of "trailers welded together" into a bingo parlor but would soon become a $13 million, 135,000-square-foot casino that has since expanded further.

Asked to create a logo, they developed a full marketing campaign instead and won the business, effectively launching the agency in January 1992. Soon after, Hunt Murray moved into its own space in a 110-year-old converted brick building in Minneapolis' warehouse district that had been artfully furnished by its previous tenant, Duffy Design Group (now part of Fallon).

The relationship clicked, partly due to Hunt Murray's respect for the Shakopee tribe's culture and the agency's decision to reflect that heritage in advertising, a strategy most other Indian casinos avoided.

Several campaigns, both funny and serious, followed, and the agency later designed logos and ads for Mahto, a North Dakota construction equipment company acquired with casino profits.

But Hunt Murray quickly burnished a reputation with work for other clients. Several seemed to relish its affectionately retro (and cost-effective) sensibility that uses cheap stock footage to strike a chord among the Nick at Nite generation.

"There's a certain charm for people who didn't live in the '50s" in using those startling images, Murray says. "It's overacted, it's produced poorly, it's schmaltzy."

"They're very good at finding stock footage you wouldn't necessarily even consider for anything and turn it into something that really sticks out," says Mike Benson, director of communications at KCBS-TV, Los Angeles, who pays Hunt Murray to create humorously "off-center" tune-in ads for syndicated fare like "Geraldo" and "Entertainment Tonight."

A TV spot for "ET," shifting stations and time slots in L.A., devolves into a dated classroom filmstrip lecture on "How the Brain Remembers" such things.

Another for Hershey Pasta Group's American Beauty brand starts off as a corny tableau of pasta and steaming dishes, replete with a beaming Italian mama and Riney-esque narrator, then abruptly interrupts itself, cutting to an eager family hawking Hershey's "shameless gimmick"-a new pasta variety shaped like the state of Minnesota.

Spots for Minnesota Brewing Co.'s Pig's Eye use a cutout b&w pirate's head-with weirdly animated lips-superimposed over a cheesy sound track and hokey stock shots that portray it as a "brutally honest beer" for "discerning tightwads." The sometimes annoying spokesman has generated a love-it-or-hate-it reaction from audiences, but the agency claims its target of twentysomething beer guzzlers is among the admirers.

Among the latest work is an outdoor campaign for the International Hockey League's Minnesota Moose, a consolation prize for the recently departed-for-Texas North Stars. A series of ads invents groups like the Minnesota Reconstructive Dentistry Association and the Zamboni Drivers Union, who thank the Moose for ensuring their continued livelihoods.

That deadpan humor is largely the work of associate creative director and chief copywriter Doug Adkins, a 27-year-old Bozell import with a knack for that very Land O' Lakes style of dry wit, who says he tries to give consumers "credit for having some gray matter."

"It's the quirky nature of what Minnesota's all about," Hunt says. "It's charm, humility, a sense of humor, but not knee-slapping wit."

The agency does have its serious side.

With subsidiary Bill Thorburn Design, Hunt Murray developed in-store displays, logos and ads for Caribou Coffee-a would-be Starbucks-and projects for Dayton's and Target Stores. Last week, a cable TV campaign introduced Recovery Engineering's PUR home water filter as a way to find "cleaner, safer drinking water" by featuring it amid breathtaking (stock) footage of cascading waterfalls.

"What we're best at is linking the consumer to the product with an emotion of some sort," Hunt says. "If you have a real rational argument, a real rational sell, you don't need Hunt Murray."

Although wary of big-agency bureaucracy, Hunt Murray hopes to woo larger clients that will give it national prominence, and the partners are encouraged by recent assignments from the likes of Coca-Cola Co. to other small shops.

But for now, they're content with some new business, including project work for the Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain and a Minnesota hospital. Hunt Murray is also one of three finalists for St. Paul Pioneer Press' $1.5 million account.

"We're not looking for clients to abuse us," Murray says.

Instead, Hunt explains, "the relationship we want to have is getting into a headlock with them and then going out and having a beer. That's what it's been."