Johnny Vulkan, one of the founding partners of Anomaly believes his organization’s point of differentiation is that they do not try to answer questions by focusing on the medium. “We don’t think in terms of advertising or PR or digital or production innovation. We’re very much grounded in a creative solution for our client’s business problem.”
Anomaly’s creative process starts “much further back” than a traditional agency’s. “We do have a process; it’s called argument, and for the most part it’s the friendliest version of a debate. We have a circle diagram that represents this. It puts the business problem at the center and then surrounds it with a diverse range of thinkers and disciplines, we then let the debates play out so we can interrogate the problem from every perspective.” This often requires meetings of a spectrum of people, ranging from designers to digital strategists. “Everybody understands the conversation differently and applies their own biases to that,” says Vulkan. “On the outset, we are looking for a range of different types of creative thinkers to engage in what has to be the broadest conversation.”
It is this mentality that has allowed Anomaly to explore numerous business ventures in pursuit of the best marketing solutions for their clients. From creating a worker training program in Detroit to redesigning the outside of a freight truck, Anomaly does not limit itself.
If company leaders feel like they are unable to provide the best resources to their clients, they are not afraid to collaborate with others. In the past Vulkan and his team at Anomaly have worked with Big Spaceship, among others firms. “We’re not trying to own everything,” Vulkan notes, “and we think we see the other agencies as competitors as much as we see them as collaborators, because we kind of feel that there’s enough business out there for all of us.” Vulkan believes in what he calls the “karma of business,” and judging by the success of the organization, this theory appears to be working. “If you just keep trying to do the right thing, then the business keeps coming,” he says, “We very rarely pitch. Most of our client comes through recommendations from other clients and we talk ourselves into the projects.”
For Vulkan and his team at Anomaly, one of the biggest challenges is the omnipresent need to have an organizational structure. “A conventional ad agency has a recognizable factory system that has a brief that goes into a defined department that spends a certain amount of defined time within that department and comes out in a certain format and is sold in familiar way.” But at Anomaly, the business model is anything but traditional. “When your company’s premise is ‘What’s the question we’re even asking?’, then it’s very hard to formalize that process. It’s much more fluid and open ended. The issue that gives us though is that there are fewer, repeatable actions.”
Some of Vulkan’s inspiration for this open-minded business concept stems back to his British roots. “I think in the UK, the industry thought advertising was an extension of the arts. I think that in the U.S. advertising and the communications industry thinks it’s an extension of commerce, which is more grounded in what I had studied in marketing.” At Anomaly, employees are expected to deliver results not awards, a philosophy Vulkan believes should be taken more seriously in the advertising industry. “Our job is not art, it’s commerce; but that can be artistic,” he says.
Working toward this idea of artistic commerce, the open layout at Anomaly is designed to foster optimal collaboration amongst employees. “We are nonhierarchical in how we sit, so different disciplines are dispersed throughout the company,” he says. “Gradually we’ve seen the personal desk sizes shrinking and the amount of collaboration space is expanding.” Vulkan notes that most of the work at Anomaly happens around whiteboards and sofas, but the concept of each worker having a desk is not entirely obsolete. “People like the stability of the desk, even if it is a place to charge your devices and to set up and keep your clutter and your ephemera and those kinds of things.” Desk or no desk, Anomaly employees all have something unique to bring to the communal table. Coming from a wide variety of different backgrounds, from traditional business to biology, Vulkan says they all share a common thread. “I think what ties them together is really an innate sense of curiosity.”