The New York Times highlights several agencies that are branching out with their own products:

• Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s Zag division launched the fashion blog Mrs. O
• Brooklyn Brothers created Fat Pig chocolate and has a furniture line in the works
• The esteemed Anomaly established the Avec Eric website and TV series for chef Eric Ripert as well as recently launched music t-shirt store I/denti/tee

Canadien agency Taxi opened their own coffeeshop and Neverstop even set up a barbershop.

So what’s going on?

Advertising agencies have dabbled in side businesses for decades, but “inventing their own brand, not dependent on clients’ largess, is the big new thing,” said George Parker, an ad agency consultant and writer of AdScam, a blog about the industry. As the economy worsens and ad budgets tighten, “the creation of intellectual property and new products is something you’re going to see a lot more of,” he said.

But beyond just adding a new revenue stream during the recession, ad agencies need to do something. Is it that the big idea alone is no longer enough? It’s necessary, but it may not be sufficient, anymore.

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The push and pull between traditional creativity — centered on the big idea and storytelling — and the disruption caused by digital technology has only just begun to play out in advertising. “Your Internet technology person will be as important as your creative person,” predicts Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital, the Google backer, and founder of an early Web agency. “It’s a data game, a speed game.”

“The best marketing is built on a deep idea that makes an impact and makes a difference, and everything supports the idea,” says Jim Stengel, global CMO of Procter & Gamble, which is being honored as Client of the Year at Cannes this week. “It’s getting artificial to break things into silos. I’d like to see more things like the Titanium. None of us sit here and say we’re going to launch a new initiative with a great print idea — it’s always what’s the idea behind the brand.”

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When you lead with digital, “How will the consumer interact with my brand?” is always the first question. The key word there is interact.  The problem comes first, then the audience, then the solution. You don’t go into the brief with an expectation of what you want to create; you go into the brief with an expectation that a solution will manifest itself in the best and most efficient way possible for the target audience. This means that the solution might not necessarily be media, but it could be a product, a Web site, a video game, a banner or even a print ad.

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In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett “gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind,” writes Lewis Hyde in a New York Times book review (4/6/08). Richard’s assumption is that we all have abilities as “craftsmen” and that pursuing those abilities “enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” In so doing, we can learn “how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop); how to work not against resistant forces but with them (as did the engineers who first drilled tunnels beneath the Thames); how to complete tasks using ‘minimum force’ (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables) … and above all … how to play, for it is in play that we find ‘the origin of the dialogue that the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass’.”

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[Update}

So Q was fantastic, and as much as I would have loved to have live-blogged the whole event, I simply got too wrapped up into the presentations. Thankfully, there were other great people who managed to document the sessions. Check out Scott Hodge’s collection of posts, and get your Flickr fix of the event here.

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Lichtfaktor – a collective of like-minded VJs and graffiti artists based in Cologne, Germany – comprises the talents of $ehvermögen, JIAR and 10X (real names Marcel Panne, David Lüpschen and Tim Fehske). The trio collaborated and developed the artform they refer to as “lightwriting” when Panne, a photographer and resident VJ of Drum & Bass label Basswerk, was commissioned to create a video projection for the Deutscher Ärzte Verlag that visualised the theme Energy In Motion.

Via Creative Review

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