Advertising of 2007

This year, the industry floundered with guerrilla ads and social networking; 2008 should reemphasize digital media and a return to sales basics

by Helen Walters

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For our round-up of the year in advertising and branding, we asked creative directors from agencies in four locations around the world to nominate work that made an impact in their regions in 2007. Our panel featured Johnny Vulkan, co-founder of and partner at the New York City-based agency, Anomaly; Simon Waterfall, current president of British advertising and design organization, D&AD, and co-founder of London-based digital agency Poke; Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder of Sydney-based creative collective, the Glue Society. Over in the multinational agency corner was Sheungyan Lo, executive creative director, northeast Asia, for JWT (WPP), based in Shanghai.

Their answers and selections of specific pieces of work are remarkable in their diversity—and yet there are also some clear common threads. For one thing, 2007 wasn't exactly a stellar year for advertising as a whole. January kicked off with a guerrilla campaign for a cartoon (BusinessWeek, 2/9/2007) that was taken for a terrorist threat and briefly shut down the city of Boston, costing the general manager of the Cartoon Network his job and sticking the parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, with a $2 million fine. The year ended with Facebook's clumsy introduction of the privacy-invading Beacon ad service; and while certain areas flourished, there were a host of misfires and missteps in the months in between. For example, ad-as-entertainment services such as Honeyshed (BusinessWeek, 5/9/2007) or bud.tv have so far failed to live up to pre-launch hype or deliver anything like watchable branded entertainment. Madison Avenue (and its global equivalents) have been floundering in the dark.

Yet, Johnny Vulkan argues, all of these forays could be a precursor to a paradigm shift. The light switch, in other words, isn't far away. And, he says, the continued industry uncertainty is prompting a return to old-school values, with advertising emphasizing the quality and benefits a business can offer its consumer. "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," he says. "Instead we're beginning to see a greater focus on something that is not even a new idea—that the products and services businesses create should be fundamentally good."

GPS Ads on London Buses

It's also an opportunity for businesses—and those marketing their products, services, and brands— to move away from the traditional advertising business model, which for years concentrated on a few lucrative outlets such as TV or radio. That won't wash in this era, and companies are looking for partners rather than mere providers. The proliferation of media opportunities means that more is possible. A new era of creative thinking is being signaled by businesses such as Yell.com, which put digital billboards fitted with GPS technology on the sides of London buses to serve ads tailored to specific locations. And while most agencies have been promising a break from "traditional" advertising for years now, 2007 was the year in which digital technology finally lived up to its promise. U.S. Internet ad spending surpassed $5 billion in the second quarter of 2007, the largest sum yet for that category, according to research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Online advertising contributed 7.4% of the total U.S. ad spend in 2007. Research outfit eMarketer predicts online will account for 13% of all U.S. advertising by the end of 2011.