Ignacio Oreamuno
President
ihaveanidea


Anomaly is not an ad agency, but it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever been to.

When I asked them to provide me with samples of their work, the anomaly in Anomaly became clear. It wasn’t that easy. They are not a TV agency, or a print agency, or a branding agency, they are an anomaly. Their work could be the design of a bottle, a ring tone, a print ad, or an ad in the back of lottery ticket.

I’m supposed to be objective and editorially unbiased so that you, the reader, can make up your mind about this place on your own, but since I’m not a journalist and I don’t work for anyone I’m going to go ahead and tell you that Anomaly kicks ass. Their model, their thinking and their vision blew me away. After one hour of being there I felt like sitting in one of their many desks and start working away.

Here’s why.

Anomaly was born out of an incredible group of prestigious big cheeses, ranging from Carl Johnson, former COO of TBWA Worldwide, to Sal LaGreca former CFO of McCann-Erickson WorldGroup, to Johnny Vulcan who was Group Creative Director and COO at TBWA. There is no doubt that the founding partners have the stripes to run the place.

But are these just a bunch of agency world burnouts rebelling in their game? I don’t think so. These guys quite simply thought too big, far and wide for their own good. The passion and vibe in the agency was incredible. By the time I finished talking to partner Johnny Vulcan I felt like either having a double scotch on the rocks or opening an agency, or both.

The first and most important aspect of Anomaly is that its hierarchy is theoretically flat and they try to have no official or senior positions. When you get an email from them, you won’t know if it’s one of the partners or an intern. This led me onto a long discussion about the benefits of this. At first glance it seems like a simple “we are a democracy” tactic that is common in new agencies. However, there is much more to this at Anomaly. Let me explain.

Anomaly is not driven to make ads, it is driven to solve business problems. And who is the best person that can solve a business problem? The answer is everyone and anyone. While at a normal agency, the business problem will be tackled by the copywriter writing a headline, the art director finding a cool font and the account guy writing a cool brief, at Anomaly they’ll try to use the tool of creativity to come out with whatever solution the business problem requires. The ‘account guy’ might think of an interactive idea, the ‘copywriter’ might find a great visual reference, and the ‘art director’ might end up writing the darn copy for it. By making everyone pull back from their ‘specialty’ they are forced to rethink not just the problem, but the solution. Does it have to be an ad? Johnny best put Anomaly’s reality in words when he told me, “we are like an open-source agency”.

Confusing? You are not the only one. Bryan Chiao, a VCU Adcenter graduate who runs a great blog called RM116 and now works at Anomaly expressed the confusion he too suffered when he came to work there. He was trained to be a creative and when he came to Anomaly he was not quite exactly sure what his 9-5 job responsibilities were at Anomaly. Now that he got the hang of it, he loves it.

It’s one thing to spend your day thinking of weird non-traditional ideas for your clients, but another thing is actually executing them. To do this, Anomaly often works with external companies who specialize in whatever idea they have given birth to. Whilst most people would likely be afraid to offer this to their clients since it might seem to appear as a form of weakness (“I can’t do this or this or that, but I know somebody that does”). Anomaly believes in the opposite, the more you work with specialists, the more you can offer your clients, and the further your ideas can go.

Hey, it’s not Anomaly’s fault they had to change the traditional agency business model, it’s the fault of our ever-changing world. According to Johnny, embracing change is like trying to surf: if you get on top of the wave, you’ll ride it, otherwise you’ll just crash and drown.

One of the things that I loved about Anomaly is that they are clients themselves. The reason for this, Johnny explained was that it forced them to think and understand money and to respect and grasp what a business, and not just an ad agency, is really like. Clients like working with people who are in the same pot they are. An ad agency that owns and developed a system for downloading NFL ring tones to your mobile phone. That’s strange, that’s Anomaly.

Anyone that thinks that they are doing what they are doing just for fun and for a change of lifestyle might be surprised to find out that they are paid by their clients on results. In other words if the crazy ideas doesn’t produce nickels and quarters, they don’t get paid. However, this does not mean that every client is right or ready for Anomaly. According to Johnny, the right clients are brave and open minded ready to implement ideas that are ahead of their time.

Anomaly totaled 15 human beings last year. Now they are 40. The culture is not forced and they try to keep it like a family as best they can. The furniture is not styled out designed or arranged for the random client meeting. It’s designed for themselves and their everyday needs. “It’s an agency for us,” Vulcan said.

Just like the famous Mother desk, Anomaly too applies the “one big desk for everyone” theorem into practice. No one has special desks, chairs or seating arrangements. Music, jokes, chatter and ideas are all thrown in the air where a random chaotic ballet occurs causing random bursts of Eurekas. At least that’s the idea. Having a big open space is important to the partners because it helps everyone to get to really know each other well, a big advantage that small agencies like theirs have over the behemoths.

My time was up and as I left the agency, Johnny Vulcan told me about this highly scientific social experiment he’s been working on for a couple of years. It involved leaving plastic lizards (lagartijus plasticus) in places without any kind of explanation. So good ol’ Johnny has been leaving them with his lunch and dinner tips and various places around the world. He buys them by the hundreds and in different colors. The purpose of this? Nothing. And everything. While he doesn’t follow up or ask what happens to the little plastic guys, they do have an effect on the world, because people pick them up, and ask “why did that crazy guy leave me a lizard with the tip?” Well, those hundreds of lizards are out there, all over the world thanks to Johnny. They’ve made people talk, they probably have become toys for kids, might have given an old woman a big scare, or served as a conversation piece in restaurant kitchens. What’s for certain is that everything, no matter how small, has some effect on the world and that us ‘communicators’ need to always remember that. Luckily for me I got one and named him Bermudez.

I’ll keep Bermudez tucked away in my business card holder until the day that I am finally ready to release him into the wild. ‘Till then he serves me as a reminder that the world is full of anomalies and that we have to understand them, embrace them and ride the waves of change into the future.