Converse amplifies its musical message with a summer song and video/spot hybrid.

"Celebrate" and "provoke." Those are the words that Geoff Cottrill, CMO of Converse, uses to describe the advertising strategy of the North Andover, Mass.-based shoemaker. "Our whole mission is to inspire originality and be an advocate and catalyst for creativity," he says.

The company is celebrating its 100th anniversary with a global campaign, "Connectivity," that taps the cultural heritage of the brand. Included is what Cottrill hopes will become a summer hit: "My Drive Thru," a Converse-commissioned music track written and performed by a disparate trio of artists: Pharrell Williams, who produced the song; up-and-coming R&B artist Santogold; and Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes.

In June, the four-minute song was released to consumers as a free download on the Converse Web site as well as distributed to radio stations. Part of a promotion called "Three Artists. One Song," the track has had daily downloads in the thousands, according to Converse, received favorable reviews from music critics and fans, and most importantly, created buzz for the brand. It's the kind of publicity Converse hopes will only get louder as the song's two-and-a-half-minute music video -- which broke online on MySpace and MTV late last week -- makes its debut today as 30- and 60-second TV and cinema commercials. (As of press time, the video had received more than 96,000 views on MySpace and had an 88 percent rating. Next week the company also plans a YouTube home page takeover.)

"If you Google search for the track, you'll see hundreds of sites have written about it and every single one mentions Converse," says Ian Toombs, senior creative/design at New York-based Anomaly, one of the campaign's architects. "The name is out there."

Converse is the latest in a growing list of companies turning to music to amplify their marketing messages. And Williams and the gang are the latest artists, including both established and up-and-coming, who are finding advertising a healthier source of promotional funding than a traditional record label... Read More>>

James Cooper explains his recent move to New York and the differences in what he does now compared to what he did before.

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You know you're dealing with, well, an anomaly when an agency touts its compensation policy at least as much as its work. For don't-call-us-an-ad-agency Anomaly, the priority on innovative deals over slavishness to meager fees translates into not just a different way of getting paid but a different way of doing business. Anomaly's credo: "All agencies are not created equal. Therefore, we do not sell time ever."

Don't want to be confused with a hoary ad agency? Then refuse to get paid like one. No time sheets means developing intellectual property and hitching compensation to sales, blurring the lines between a marketing execution and a business solution and disrupting traditional notions of what an agency can aspire to.

That's how Anomaly does it, and in 2007, the 3-year-old model really took off, with strong work in design, guerrilla promotion, interactive and traditional creative for clients ranging from a 100-year-old sneaker brand to a fledgling airline to a children's charity. It all filled the bill of media neutrality -- a marketing clichÈ that might make Anomaly founders such as Carl Johnson blanch but nevertheless is dead accurate. It helps that Anomaly is committed to a diverse staff that can dive into product development as easily as it can create brand communications.

Marrow in Jawbone
Witness Anomaly's work for Aliph, the maker of the Yves Behar-designed Bluetooth headset known as the Jawbone. As the company's de facto marketing department, Anomaly handled online advertising, public relations and celebrity seeding. It helped make Jawbone the highest-selling and best-reviewed product of its kind. In return, Anomaly is getting a royalty for every headset sold and a stake in Aliph. The creative centerpiece of the Jawbone work was a series of short web films from legendary music-director Samuel Bayer illustrating how the headset blocks out noise.

Back in 2004, Virgin America, Richard Branson's airline start-up, tasked Anomaly with handling launch duties. But less important than manufacturing ads to be supported by Virgin's tiny media spend was a host of other work undertaken by New York-based Anomaly. The insides of Virgin's jets, for instance, was designed with Anomaly's consultation, as were the ticketing, website and in-flight-entertainment deals. Virgin and Anomaly parted ways at the end of 2007 but not before creating a case study illustrating how deep into experience creation an agency can go.

With these ideas popping, it's hard to get excited about Anomaly's biggest traditional win: ad duties for Converse. The relationship produced stark, well-received work for the sneaker brand, but more interesting was a guerrilla attack for a different client. The program infiltrated the queues outside retailers for Apple's iPhone with an Anomaly staff promotion for Keep a Child Alive, an organization working to get medication for African children with HIV. Anomaly folks waited in line to buy the very first iPhone, then auctioned it off for $100,000 on eBay. This bit of postmodern marketing fun both fueled and benefited from the media trance around iPhone, resulting in 50 million media impressions in a week.

Splitting off
Rounding out 2007 was the establishment of Another Anomaly, which interprets quite literally Jay Chiat's maxim about getting big. Once Anomaly hit 60 employees, an optimal head count, it was clear another shop was needed, not more and more layers of bureaucracy -- the bugaboo of fast-growing shops -- at the current one. Hence, the new shop that stands completely independent of the original, save for a set of shared values.

The year ahead should be a big one as joint ventures to develop products with skin-care expert Tammy Ha and Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert come to fruition and as Anomaly launches its model in London. The shop is also dropping hints about new products from a joint venture between Coca-Cola Co. and NestlÈ, more opportunities for Anomaly to continue to break down the limits of what an agency can be.

If nothing else, Anomaly -- with its obsession on innovation -- should provide a blueprint for an ad agency in a post-advertising world, where consumers are too sharp for empty sales pitches and marketers are so desperate for real, fast solutions to complex business problems.

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In the first in our series looking back at the best global branding and marketing of the year, Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly gives the view from the U.S.

by Johnny Vulkan

"Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking."

Silence.

In the vast chamber, high ranking marketing executives, attending a conference organized by industry paper Advertising Age, shuffled nervously in their foldout chairs before a couple of stifled chuckles drifted over the room, mingling momentarily with the familiar buzz of twitching BlackBerrys. Breathe everyone, breathe.

The damning words came from Robert Stephens, the charismatic founder of Geek Squad and builder of one of the growing number of brands that have been built without the help of Madison Avenue. I think it would be safe to say he's done a pretty good job.
Remarkable Year for Marketing

A few weeks earlier I'd heard Scott Cook, founder of Intuit (INTU), speak. Intuit produces Quicken and QuickBooks financial software. "A brand is what a friend tells a friend it is. Not what a company tells them," he said firmly.

Shuffling executives, nervous chuckles, more twitching BlackBerrys. You get the picture. This year hasn't been a wonderful one for advertising professionalsóunless your business is advertising conferences entitled "The Future of Marketing"óbut 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. Take for example the plucky crew at Blendtec and their wonderful Will It Blend? viral video series that has been viewed more than 70 million times. They're actually making money from their marketing by selling advertising and taking commissions to blend things, all while enjoying exponential growth in sales of their iPhone-obliterating blenders.
Thinking Differently About Brands

Or look at the grassroots efforts of a sports journalist in Britain who created My Football Club, a Web-based initiative that galvanized more than 50,000 soccer fans to become owners and managers of fledgling football club Ebbsfleet United. These new owners get to vote for who is on the team and who gets bought and sold. All of this was done with a marketing budget of essentially zeroóyet they've already attracted big-name sponsors such as EA Sports (ERTS) and Eurostar.

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 servicesóor 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" advertisingóprimarily 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. And a fair chunk has found its way to ambitious Gen Y'ers who have their hearts set on following the example of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
A Business Imperative

We've moved past the point where bragging rights belong to the creators of articulate analogies or metaphors for why one generic car drives better than another. Instead we're beginning to see a greater focus on something that is not even a new ideaóthat the products and services businesses create should be fundamentally good.

This is not some romantic notion of a utopia where only good or useful products existóit is a business imperative. Where we used to advertise 'at' people, technology now creates more opportunities for people to answer backónot just to the advertisers themselves, but to everyone.

If your product is not as good as the competition, or if it fails to live up to your claims, the world will soon know about it and no amount of cleverness will save youónor should it. Businesses ought to welcome the feedback and dialog. Harnessed correctly, it will make things better for everyone.
Learning From Facebook

Pick any industry and there are people experimenting with innovative new modelsóin many cases bypassing traditional channels on the way to marketing their thinking. Radiohead's "pay what you want" album release or the recent launch of rcrdlbl.com, a brand-supported model for free independent music, are just the latest rounds in the music industry's creative destruction. Both represent creative thinking that bears little resemblance to the models of old.

And then there's Facebook, unquestionably the media and marketing story of 2007óand the plot continues to thicken. A bold move earlier in the year moved the audience beyond the college heartland, and the opening up of application development has helped to expand a passionate, vibrant community populated as much by affluent young professionals as by students. But the community can also bite back.
A Remarkable Opportunity for the Industry

Days after announcing the innovative new Beacon advertising model, a hastily formed group on Facebook accused the network of abusing user privacy. Fifty thousand members later, the model has been changed and the faltering start may be enough to demand a more radical rethink. In this instance, Facebook put an advertising modelóand pressure to show quicker returnsóahead of its community. To its credit, executives do appear to be listening. And listening may just be the most important skill for marketers and the media in 2008.

The year that saw S„o Paulo ban outdoor advertising for being a "blight" on the city has been a difficult and confusing time for the industry. But it really represents a remarkable opportunity. Technology has, intentionally or not, given us open channels to millions of people, and with them instant feedback on the products we make and the messages we deliver. Choose to ignore that and we will certainly fail. Choose to listen and we can deliver better products and services in a genuine way. That seems like a good idea.

For a look at Vulkan's pick of the year's top innovations and trends in advertising, see BusinessWeek's slide show.

Johnny Vulkan is a partner and co-founder of Anomaly, a marketing communications agency comprising over 100 diverse professionals spanning business and creativity. Company co-founders Jason DeLand and Carl Johnson also contributed to this article.

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By Kunal Dutta

James Cooper, the creative director at Dare, is leaving the agency to join Another Anomaly in New York.

Cooper is the first major hiring for Another Anomaly since it launched in August. As a creative director, he will work with the agency's founding partners Duncan Bird and Natasha Jakubowski on clients including Coca-Cola, the Association of National Advertisers and Sony BMG.

Andy Amadeo, a former executive creative director of Mustoes and CDP, who has been freelancing at Dare for the past few months, will take Cooper's position as co-head of Dare's creative department.

Cooper has been at Dare since 2005, working alongside the creative partner Flo Heiss across clients including ITV, Sony and Vodafone Europe. Before that, he worked at Agency Republic as the creative director on O2, the BBC and Smirnoff.

Bird said: "First hires are critical to the development of any new company and James' skill set is perfect for the opportunities we are creating."

Last week, a senior person at Ogilvy in New York said to me: "If we present a plan for our client that looks anything like last year's, we'll get fired."

This accurately captures the environment we're operating in. It has left big agencies scrambling to change, or at least appear to change, and the market open to anybody with a good idea. Media, technology, business models and consumer behaviour are moving significantly, and moving fast.

Traditional agencies are consequently under pressure from all kinds of places, not just small shops, but media agencies commissioning content, media owners producing content and digital agencies hoovering up ever-increasing sums of money.

The last thing anyone in their right mind would do here is start an advertising agency.

In the US, this need for change isn't a fad, it's not about spin, it isn't about incrementalism ñ it's about fundamental, irreversible and continuous change. It's about a true democracy of ideas, where no-one has the automatic right to answer ñ internally or externally. It's causing, or should be causing, re-evaluation of the business agencies are in, the talent they need, the processes they follow, the financial structures they operate within and the difficult task of change management.

Senior clients are desperate for new thinking, as they are caught between the worst possible rock and hard place: the relentless demand from their bosses for innovation, combined with the ever-increasing pressure on accountability.

However, for those in the agency world prepared to embrace the opportunity, this is the best of times, limited only by their own ambition.

What of London? The concentration of talent is phenomenal, but the embracing of the need to change seems patchy, with the biggest barrier to making that change being attitudinal. "These digital agencies are getting a bit uppityÖ fancy their chances at the main brief." "Digital is just another channel." "Had a brilliant day ñ persuaded the client to make three 30s rather than two." Terrifying.

Perhaps I've been away too long and "gone native", but, as much as anything, it seems to be a reflection of one dimension of national character ñ the open-minded, eager to move forward, embracing of progress that results in the US truly being "the capital of opportunity" compared with the "don't you know we used to run the world?" complacency that still pervades certain areas of the UK.

A sense of innate superiority is no match for drive, an open mind, entrepreneurialism and vision that results in Google, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, TiVo, etc.

Maybe the UK is different. Maybe these changes won't happen. Maybe clients are still biased to hearing answers from their ad agency. Maybe there's no rush. Maybe. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Anomaly, the independent agency founded by Carl Johnson, has been appointed by the sports shoe manufacturer Converse to handle creative work on its $20 million account.

The agency is also expected to take over communications planning for the brand, which is part of the Nike portfolio.

Converse had worked with Butler Shine Stern & Partners in Sausalito, California, for three years.

Converse will work closely with Anomaly's creative chief, Mike Byrne. Before joining the agency last year, Byrne was the co-creative director on Nike at Wieden & Kennedy in Portland.

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NEW YORK Converse has hired Anomaly to handle creative duties on its ad account, sources said. Estimated billings are $20 million.

Anomaly, an independent agency here, is also expected to execute communications planning for the brand, which is part of Nike's portfolio.

Independent Wieden + Kennedy handles media duties for all Nike brands.

Independent Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners in Sausalito, Calif., split with Converse in the spring. Butler, Shine worked on the account for three years.

At Anomaly, Converse will work closely with creative chief Mike Byrne, who before joining the agency last year was a co-creative director on Nike at Wieden in Portland, Ore.

The hire came after months of meetings between the North Andover, Mass.-based Converse and Anomaly, whose other clients include Coca-Cola, Virgin America and Beverage Partners Worldwide.

Anomaly referred calls to the client, which could not immediately be reached.

Previous major media spending on the brand has ranged from less than $5 million in 2004 to nearly $20 million in both 2005 and 2006, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Spending in the first five months of 2007 approached $10 million, per Nielsen.

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By Helen Walters

Just off the phone from Duncan Bird, a former ad guy in London who's now also the former VP of Futures of Sony BMG. He's in the process of moving to New York to set up a new company of the ad agency we featured as part of our Cutting Edge Designers profiles, Anomaly. This new agency will be called, appropriately enough, Another Anomaly (damned smartypants ad people). But, while the new agency will share certain elements of business infrastructure, such as financial reporting, IT support, etc, it remains legally separate from its sister company. The set-up is an innovative solution to a problem that big corporations have wrestled with since time immemoriam. Namely. What to do when you get too big? And how to avoid being a victim of your own success?

As Bird puts it, "When companies get to a certain size, despite everyone's best interests and ambitions, they lose their clarity of vision and culture." He reckons the ideal employee number is somewhere between 60 and 100. Given that Anomaly already has 80-90 staff members, the only solution was, essentially, to start again. "An uber company loses its clarity, agility and ingenuity," remarks Bird. Then he points to someone he's been observing for the past couple of years, who's well known to the American public (and the world): Simon Cowell. Cowell has his own businesses-within-a-business, Syco TV and Syco Music, housed within Sony BMG. "He's brilliant and his ventures probably bring in 30-40% of Sony BMG's revenues," says Bird. "His company has 9 people." The inference is clear -- let people continue to do what they do best and they'll continue to be successful. Protected, incubated ventures can do well for a bigger whole. As for whether Another Anomaly will be successful, well, we'll have to wait and see, but expect ventures that blend the worlds of music/entertainment. And in the meantime, in case you haven't seen it, here's an entirely gratuitous video of Paul Potts, the winner of Britain's Got Talent, a Simon Cowell protege who's taking the world by storm -- and who only recently was working at a branch of Carphone Warehouse.

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by Staff Brand Republic

NEW YORK - Duncan Bird has left his role at Sony BMG Music Entertainment to rejoin the advertising industry, helping to establish a second office of US hotshop Anomaly.

The new agency, which is based in New York, is known as Another Anomaly. Bird is setting the business up with Natasha Jakubowski, who joins from Redscout, a New York branding consultancy. Founding clients include Coca-Cola, the Association of National Advertisers, and a new skincare range the agency is developing, which it will own a 40% stake in.

The first Anomaly office launched in 2004, co-founded by Carl Johnson, who was chief operating officer at TBWA\Worldwide, and Johnny Vulkan, former TBWA\ group creative director.

It launched with a design brief for the Coca-Cola water brand Dasani, but now works on a range of branding disciplines -- sometimes starting as early as creating a brand concept for a client or developing its own intellectual property, which it licenses to clients for a share of fees.

Johnson said that the idea of opening a second agency was to increase the Anomaly "bandwidth", with a separate entity carrying the added advantage of allowing them to bring in senior partners rather than just adding more people and building a big agency.

Johnson told Brand Republic: "We've declined 40 pitches, and we're getting a stream of entrepreneurial ideas most of which we are turning down...This gives us more partners to say 'do you fancy this? Do we fancy this?'"

He described Anomaly and Another Anomaly as "one brand, two flavours".

Earlier this year, Campaign magazine revealed that Anomaly was plotting the launch of a London office, with Johnson saying: "We are looking seriously at London by year-end, providing we can find the right talent here."

He said today that the timing was still on track.

Bird joined Sony in February 2006, taking on the new role of vice-president of brand partnerships. Prior to that, he was founder and managing director of Soul Advertising, but he left the agency when it was bought by Nitro in 2005.

Before launching Soul in 2000, Bird was group business director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Bird was also one of the creators of a 'Keepy Uppy' game, along with his fellow Soul founders, which became a bestseller around Christmas 2003.
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by Mark Sweney

Duncan Bird, the Sony BMG vice-president of futures, is to set up a new business in New York, backed by Carl Johnson, the founder of multi-disciplinary agency Anomaly.

Mr Bird described the venture as a "hybrid somewhere between an agency and a manufacturer".

"The primary focus is on creating and launching products and services that create intellectual property that can be exploited," he said. "We are not an advertising agency."

He joined Sony BMG after the sale in 2005 of Soul, the London ad agency which he co-founded.

Mr Bird is launching the new agency, called Another Anomaly, with Natasha Jakubowski, a partner and strategic director at innovation consultancy Redscout.

The SoHo-based agency will launch with 10 staff, covering brand strategy, new product development, design, content creation, advertising and digital.

Clients already signed up include Coca-Cola and the Association of American Advertisers.

Sony BMG and Another Anomaly will also work together in the future.

Another Anomaly will be a stand-alone business from the original Anomaly "legally, financially and physically".

The original Anomaly agency has shaken up the advertising scene in New York since Mr Johnson, the former chief operating officer at ad network TBWA, launched it in 2004.

Rather than work on a commission basis for creating ads, the agency will just as often eschew commercials and create concepts such as a brand name, licensing a product or designing packaging, and look to take royalties.

A major coup for Anomaly was hiring Mike Byrne, the creative brain behind Nike's 2002 Cannes Grand Prix-winning "Tag" commercial, last year.

Other agencies have moved into this area, including Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which launched a brand invention arm, called Zag, run by former Unilever brand director Neil Munn.

While at ad agency Soul, Mr Bird was one of the creators of the best-selling board game Keepy Uppy: The Game, which sold 150,000 units and was a top 10 Christmas game in the UK.
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Anomaly is pioneering a new model whereby it provides its creative services in return for a take of the profits. It's a high-risk strategy that could change the industry.

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Anomaly

Co-founded in New York by industry stalwart Carl Johnson, Anomaly promised to be yet another agenda-smashing advertising and marketing company. But since its inception in 2004, the founders and directors have truly shown a different way of doing things, blurring the borders between providing traditional marketing services and working as a business development partner. Eschewing the traditional client/agency relationship, Anomaly works to develop intellectual property for both itself and for its clients, including Virgin America, for which it recently developed a line of luggage with Burtonóprofits are split among the three partners. Another recent introduction was ShopText, a U.S.-based mobile commerce platform Anomaly developed in-house, which is now being used by the likes of publisher CondÈ Nast. Shown here is work in progress for Eu, a premium range of skin-care products Anomaly developed that will launch this fall.

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ShopText Picked for NY Post Hot List

8 Quick tix
The Knitting Factory's debuted a new Ticketing-by-Text feature, where you can buy gig ducats straight from your cellphone. Register for an account at shoptext.com.

Back in 1988, five admen launched an agency called Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow & Johnson.

It sold to TBWA in 1997 and the founders ended up going their separate ways. But 20 years on, most of them are still making headlines.

Chris Palmer recently won the Chairman's Award at the British Television Advertising Awards, Mark Denton has shaken up Creative Circle to great effect, Simon Clemmow last week topped up his bank balance when Clemmow Hornby Inge sold a stake to WPP, and now Carl Johnson is plotting a new assault on the UK by bringing his Anomaly agency to London.

A UK launch for Anomaly will depend on Johnson finding the right partners, but it's no coincidence that just as he feels the time is right to make a UK move, his former agency TBWA is also planning to launch a new shop into the UK: Media Arts Lab.

Students of the adland barometer that is the quarterly Bellwether Report will know that marketing budget rises have just hit a three-year high and initial budget setting for 2007 is at its highest since 2000.

So if you're going to open up over here, now seems like a pretty good time to do it.

The climate also seems ripe for the Anomaly model. As Bellwether revealingly underlines, the biggest growth is coming from direct, internet and interactive advertising; the traditional ad agency is having to redraw its lines of operation.

Anomaly bills itself very clearly as a new model agency. It describes itself as a response to the notion that the old agency models "are all broken" and "the traditional solutions are becoming less and less effective".

Its positioning sounds like a bunch of cliches, because so many agencies are talking about the need to re-gear their approach around the same principles: ideas-led, media-neutral, integrated, multi-disciplinary. Anomaly, though, launched with these principles at its core.

A little like Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Anomaly focuses on developing intellectual property that the agency can then license to clients in return for a share of revenues. And embedded in its DNA is the ambition to create its own brands ñ something Bartle Bogle Hegarty has long talked about doing here, but with little tangible progress so far. So Anomaly owns Shop Text, a transactional system that operates on mobile phones, and Lucky Media, which puts commercial messages on the back of Lottery tickets.

Of course, to do any of this properly (as opposed to superficially enshrining it all on PowerPoint and then actually just doing all the usual advertising stuff), you need the right mix of people. Anomaly New York has staff from media, design, PR, events as well as specialists in fields such as NPD, branding mobile and commercial rights, and some heavy hitters from the traditional account, planning and creative spheres.

Whether Johnson can compile an equally compelling mix of talent in the UK will be the real test. If he pulls it off, he will leapfrog an agency market here that recognises its model needs reinventing, but cannot ñ as yet ñ pull free of the comforts of the old world order.

The New York Times
By LOUISE STORY
IMPULSE shoppers, watch out. Your cellphone might soon get you into trouble.

A company called ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone.

Consumers can already use text messages to buy some products. Ads for the new CD by singer Tim McGraw carry a texting code, as do magazine writeups for the new Harry Potter novel coming this summer. Some concert halls are selling tickets by text message, and some charities are taking donations that way.

CosmoGirl magazine will feature text-message codes throughout its June/July issue, both in the advertising and editorial pages. And Stuff magazine is introducing text-to-buy on products like CDs, DVDs and video games featured in its pages.

At the center of the technology is ShopText, a small company in New York that takes the orders, charges the consumer's credit card and ships out the merchandise. To use the system, a consumer must first place a phone call to ShopText to set up an account, specifying a shipping address and card account. After that, all purchases can be made by thumb.

When ShopText receives text messages about donations or products, it charges the credit card it has on file for the buyer, then, if appropriate, sends the product from one of its warehouses around the country.

"E-commerce only represents a fraction of total retail ó the thing that holds it back is it's tethered to an Internet connection," said Mark Kaplan, founder and chief marketing officer of ShopText. "The cellphones link products to media. When people get the impulse to buy, they have their cellphones."


ShopText was started in 2005 within Anomaly, an ad agency in New York, and worked at first with the PayPal unit of eBay to build text-message shopping tools. In November, ShopText was spun off as its own company, and since then it has been busy trying to persuade media outlets and marketers that mobile phone shopping, or m-commerce, stands to become as lucrative as e-commerce.

Eventually, the company hopes to figure out which media is best to sell which products.

"Guys might be buying electronics out of Wired and other places, and women might do something completely different," said Steve Roberts, president and chief executive of ShopText. "The reality is nobody knows that right now."

Some media executives are already sold.

"I've always had a dream that girls should be able to buy what's in the magazine," said Susan Schulz, editor in chief of CosmoGirl, which is published by Hearst. "As she's flipping through, I want her to be sitting there with her phone with her magazine. It will be very interactive."

CosmoGirl advertisers are able to sell or offer samples of any of their products using text codes in their ads. On the editorial side, the magazine is including the codes on many products featured in its "Hot 100" entertainment list, so that readers will be able to buy CDs, DVDs and possibly vouchers to see movies.

Mariam Salari, a 33-year-old doctoral student in New York, says she could see herself shopping quite a bit using her thumb and her phone.

"I have stacks of things I've ripped out of magazines," Ms. Salari said. "At the end of the month, I have 50 things on my desk, and I've never bought them."

Last year, Lucky and CosmoGirl and a few other magazines experimented with the codes in their pages. In Lucky's April issue, readers could buy a pair of jeans via text-messaging, and in CosmoGirl's March issue, readers could get samples of Johnson & Johnson products.

Russell A. Kern, director of business development for Dennis Digital, the interactive division of Dennis Publishing, which publishes Stuff, said he saw great power in the technology.

"You're sitting in Central Park reading a magazine, and you have your phone with you, and you want information on a product or you want to purchase the product," he said. "The ability is right there."

The technology will also help magazines in trying to prove their effectiveness as marketing vehicles. Marketers can already determine how many people click on their Internet advertisements, and with the ShopText system they will be able to tell which magazines generate the most sales, because each text code can be unique to the magazine it appears in.

"It's a way of adding some of the Web's friendliness to advertisers on the printed page," said Serena Torrey, director of communications strategy and business development for New York magazine, which is considering adding ShopText's codes.

Text-messaging is not the only way to use cellphones for purchases.

MasterCard is testing mobile payment in New York with Nokia phones that can be used to shop at stores like CVS and McDonald's, using a radio technology called near-field communication. Other marketers are experimenting with other systems like Bluetooth, G.P.S. and bar codes.

But text-messaging is already popular. About 35 percent of cellphone users send or receive text messages, according to Forrester Research, a technology consultancy. Text-messaging is even more popular among young people, with 76 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds using it.

And people are growing more accustomed to sending text messages for reasons other than staying in touch with their friends. Every episode of the television show "American Idol," for instance, encourages viewers to vote for contestants via text message.

"This is our audience's chosen device," said Jared Hoffman, president and chief executive of the Knitting Factory, which runs concert stages in New York City and Los Angeles. "Our consumers have their cellphones out during the shows. People are capturing images with their friends, texting with their friends, arranging to meet afterwards."

The Knitting Factory is selling tickets through text messages and is looking at other ways to use the feature, like encouraging audience members to text-message to join an online discussion about the concert that night.

Starting this month the teenage country singer Taylor Swift will let her audience text to buy recordings of the concerts ó during the show. Mr. Kaplan of ShopText said this use of his company's technology might encourage more people to buy legal recordings rather than make bootleg copies.

Tim McGraw, the country music singer, is not only selling his new CD "Let It Go" through ShopText, but will also solicit charitable donations to the Tug McGraw Foundation, a nonprofit named for his father, Tug McGraw, the former New York Mets pitcher who died of brain cancer. Text codes for the foundation will appear on signs during the New York Marathon this fall.

And the company has received its copies of J. K. Rowling's last Harry Potter book: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Rather than waiting in line when the book is in stores in July, Harry Potter fans can order the book now with their phones. (Text "Potter" to 467467.)

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/02/01/8398979/index.htm?postversion=2007021305

In a story in a recent business magazine, "agency creative" was on a list of jobs that won't exist in 10 years, given the rise of consumer participation in the brand communications process. We don't agree, but how do you see the role of the agency creative director (however you define agency and creative director) changing in the next several years?

Mike Byrne
ECD, Anomaly

The role of agency creative director, according to me, should be thought of like Robin Williams' character, John Keating, in Dead Poet's Society. He took students from traditional backgrounds with traditional mindsets and set them free. So, based on his character, this is how I think of the role of creative director.

You set people free by creating an environment that allows them to command total belief in themselves. You give them ownership of projects, and by doing that you give them the chance to fail. You remind them some day they will be "food for worms" and now is the time to make their lives extraordinary, and they can do that with one idea. You remember there is a little creative child in all of us, and that child has to be awarded from time to time. You encourage them to break shit, to let loose, to embarrass themselves. You remind them to have a life outside of this business, because it will make them that much better at this business. You hire people who inspire you. You also hire inventors, entrepreneurs, comedians, filmmakers and dreamers. (most of us were this person before we found advertisingñand this is the same person who is leading this business into the future). You don't have an ego. You have a mission (refer to Albert Einstein's Ideas and Opinions.) You have them read Designing For People by Henry Dreyfuss. And you really try to feed them anything that inspires you and encourage them to do the same. You make them not use e-mail for a week. You give them all the support they need to be creativeñwhatever their idea, they can package it, develop it and sell it. You encourage them to have an opinion and to be able to articulate that opinion. You fight for their ideas.