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The most innovative and effective of it will likely make its way to Cannes next year. Whether it becomes the stuff of a revolution, a trend, or a perishable anecdote is up to the work.

And of course us.

Because sometimes the future of advertising is nothing more than the gathering of the quotidian facts of our most recent pasts and using them against us.

Idea Factories

Lousy Agencies Have Foosball Tables, Too

The challenge of chronicling anything that is new and allegedly innovative, especially in the emerging subgenre of unvertising boutiques (ad agencies in denial), is that by the time you read this, the hot new shop may already have cooled down, grown too fast, become a casualty of a global economic downturn, closed its stunningly designed doors, dismantled its indoor skate park, or fired the in-house barista.

Or, it may have morphed into something else.

Or, if it’s really hot, and especially successful, the founding partners who had touted themselves to the editors of Creativity and Fast Company as progressive, beyond-advertising-establishment rebels may already have done the unthinkable and sold a majority share of Crying Clown Inc. to one of the big-three global holding companies.

If any of the above is the case with the profiles of idea factories woven into the pages that follow, what can I tell you? Read them as cautionary tales, think of them as creative sorbets, or the contents of a time capsule labeled “One Jackass’s Take on Innovative Ad Shops, Circa 2009.”

Of the dozens of agencies I visited and the dozens of campaigns I pursued, the ones that captivated me most weren’t the most successful or recognizable or the biggest, but the most progressive, smart, and innovative.

What most interests me is ideas.

Compelling commercial ideas, and the different ways and reasons why people enjoy making them.

The Soundtrack to a Movie That Doesn’t Exist

42 Entertainment

Somehow I can’t imagine that Leo Burnett or David Ogilvy or Ray Rubicam—even twenty-first-century reincarnations of the legendary admen—would think that placing an object next to a public urinal in a rock concert arena would constitute anything close to the proverbial big idea upon which successful ad campaigns are built.

But if you happened to be taking a leak during a Nine Inch Nails (NIN) rock concert in Barcelona or Lisbon in 2007, there is a chance that you’d not only stumble (or urinate) upon a big idea, you’d become an integral part of it. How? As part of a marketing campaign/ alternate-reality game (ARG)/ performance-art spectacle on behalf of a forthcoming NIN album called Year Zero, the band’s leader, Trent Reznor, and the marketing boutique 42 Entertainment went to unprecedented extremes.

It began with a series of highlighted letters on a 2007 NIN concert T-shirt that spelled out the message “I am trying to believe.” Curious fans who had the wherewithal (and nothing-else-better-to-do-withal) to do a search on the phrase were then led to a series of 42 Entertainment–created Web sites about a fictional “Year Zero” that depicted a dystopian world where the government has taken complete control of society and imposed a Christian Fundamentalist theocracy that, among other things, drugs the public water supply and has an Orwellian “Bureau of Morality.” The Web sites and the blogs they spun off claimed to be the work of freedom-fighting rebels who were sending messages from the future (2022) to warn people in the year 2007 about the horrors to come.

Then, in addition to the above, came the infamous urinal drops. Specifically, USB (Zip) drives were left in bathrooms at NIN concerts. Along with further clues and warnings about the world of “Year Zero,” the drives contained unreleased tracks from NIN’s soon-to-come album, some in garage-band format, which would allow fans to remix and repurpose the music.

This is all brilliant for a number of reasons, especially since, in 2007, the release of a new Nine Inch Nails album was hardly a cause for