Three similar comments at recent talks gave us something to think about on the subject of advertising and its future. Speakers from Mozilla, Anomaly, and Thrillist all have discussed the same notion: that they don’t spend money on advertising.
At the Influx Curated event in San Francisco recently, Paul Kim who runs Mozilla’s marketing, talked about how the tech company turned to the community to help get the word out about their products and organizing ‘download drives’ on certain days.
At the PSFK Conference NYC 09 Carl Johnson of Anomaly talked about the IP projects his agency develop. He told the audience [...]

At PSFK Conference NYC, Danielle Sacks (Fast Company) led a thought-provoking discussion about the rise of the “New Idea Agencies” – companies that are thinking outside of the traditional client-agency model and creating their own products, brands, and intellectual property to launch direct to market. The panel, featuring Robbie Vitrano (Trumpet), Carl Johnson (Anomaly), Bart Haney (fuseproject), and Ben Malbon (BBH Labs), explained how their companies’ unique business models evolved and the struggles (and benefits) of agencies becoming their own clients.
Developing IP rather than just messaging is clearly an attractive idea. Why build brands that, ultimately, you have no stake [...]

We’re looking forward to having Carl Johnson, partner at Anomaly, join us at PSFK Conference New York on April 2. Carl will be part of our panel discussion about the pursuit of intellectual property and how it’s changing the way agencies and new businesses operate. He will be joined in discussion by Bart Haney (fuseproject), Robbie Vitrano (Trumpet), Ben Malbon (BBH Labs), and moderator Danielle Sacks (Fast Company).
First, who are you and what do you do?
Carl Johnson.
Partner at Anomaly.
I’m trying, with my Partners, to create a company that doesn’t look like one that has existed before…that has no boundaries…that is [...]