Vulkan On 2007: Advertising Suffers While Innovation Blooms

Business Week has invited Johnny Vulkan to discuss his view on the year in advertising (2007). The PSFK friend and partner at Anomaly painted a not-too rosey picture of the sector. He says that there are a lot of great brands are now being developed without the traditional support of advertising – resting on their values as good products and services.

This year hasn’t been a wonderful one for advertising professionals—unless your business is advertising conferences entitled “The Future of Marketing”—but 2007 will prove to have been a remarkable year for the marketing profession in general.

The best stories of well-marketed businesses and brands have come from companies that haven’t spent their money on conventional media but have adopted new approaches.

…This may well be cause for concern if you’re an advertising or media agency whose business model is predicated on clients spending lots of money on creative work, and then buying media. But it may end up being good news for the people who actually buy products and services—or those who care to think differently about what’s really needed from brands these days.

The money hasn’t disappeared; it’s just that some of it is being invested in places other than “traditional” advertising—primarily in products and services themselves. The creativity that was once the preserve of advertising has surfaced in rapidly expanding research and development departments at a new generation of creative innovation businesses.

The Year in Advertising

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