Carl Johnson, co-founder of Anomaly, a marketing communications firm and advertising agency, isn’t actually staying in Cannes. He’s staying at the historic Hotel du Cap in Antibes, an extravagant celebrity destination since the early days of Hemingway. Johnson has a bit of the Hemingway in him himself, insofar as he has a gut and some stubble, curses somewhat liberally, and actually says what he thinks. In a town—he drove in to Cannes for our interview—where so many people are repeating variations on familiar themes, he made for a refreshing lunch partner.
Johnson, now in his early 50s, hadn’t been to Cannes for over a decade. After Sept. 11, 2001, the then-COO of TBWA\Worldwide packed up the family and moved from New York to Sydney, where he spent two years “on the beach.” He only got back into advertising in 2004, when he started Anomaly: the firm or agency or whatever you want to call it—he prefers “a place for clients to go when they don’t know where to go”—that is responsible not only for successful Budweiser, Converse, and Sony campaigns, but for the Emmy-winning television show Avec Eric, the experience of flying Virgin America (down to the interior, the uniforms, and the entertainment), and all the posters and stickers around New York City for a soccer team that doesn’t even exist . . . yet. In 2010, Adweek picked Anomaly as one of six top insurgent agencies to watch.
We were sitting at a table on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, which is to Cannes Lions’ wealthier delegates what Rick’s was to Casablanca. Arguably, you could meet everyone you wanted to meet at this festival without leaving your table. (Ours, incidentally, had been offered to us by Arianna Huffington.) But that also had something to do with the fact that so much of what was being said on stage sounded the same. The chances of getting through a lecture in Cannes without hearing a CEO or CMO or COO talk about the importance of “content” was about as good as your chances of getting a helicopter ride out to a yacht, which is to say, roughly one in 20.
Here was something else. And that, of course, is what Anomaly set out to be. But it’s been seven years since 2004, and in the new landscape, there are many agencies that describe themselves as “not an agency” and talk about “breaking down silos.” So how long can Anomaly continue to be an anomaly?