A beautiful response to our magazine from the VP of Production at a multi-award-winning ad agency:

I received your brochure in the mail a few days ago and I really was amazed from the work of your company.

About 25 years ago I started to work in advertising in an agency in my home town Florence, Italy. I remember that at the time I saw advertising as a form of Art, where the creative approach to the “message” was thru an artistic creative visualization of an idea. I believed at the time the value of the idea (the concept) had to be equal to the way that the idea was executed. In a few words the message had to have a balance between the idea and the artistic visualization of it.

Now I see that way too often many advertising agencies lost the artistic approach to communication, and the idea is dominant in the message, without having a balance with the way the idea is visualized. So many times we see great concept campaigns, but lacking a great deal in their artistic execution.

And the Art of Advertising is gradually disappearing in front of our eyes, living space only to a flat cocktail of great marketing ideas that look all the same in their execution.

I am not sure if I was able to express what I really feel and mean (since my first language is Italian), but I can tell you this: Every day I receive in the mail many brochures and catalogues from a variety of talented people. But when I received your promotional piece, for the first time in years, I stopped and lifted every page with a mix of curiosity and admiration for what I was looking at!!

In a few words I was “mesmerized”…!!

I can finally see that someone have a similar idea of how Art and Advertising should be combined together.

Good job! And if one of these days I will come to New York I will stop to visit you guys, bringing with me a bottle of good Italian wine to celebrate your talent!

Ciao, Nicola

Such an inspiring email for us and it’s reward for all our efforts to showcase genuine talent and craftsmanship in opposition to the bland repetitive design of recent years.  We’ve been guilty of repeating ourselves over the years so I don’t exclude Vault49 from criticism either, but I do think we’ve been getting it right for a while now in terms of our approach to reinvention and a constant evolution.  I think that what Nicola refers to as ‘the Art of Advertising’ has undergone a renaissance in the past seven years, especially in Europe, but the market quickly became saturated with swathes of copy-cat, and repetitive digital illustration; cheap imitations of something truly impressive.  The positive side to this is that we now believe that it takes real talent and craft to stand out from the crowd, and in return this really does give a great opportunity for the ‘Art’ to return to ‘Advertising’.