In this series of posts, Tatyana Strashnenko (Strategic Planning Director TBWA\Moscow) celebrates Russian innovation with disruption stories from the country’s past and present.

Continuing our dip into Russia’s culture of inventiveness.

Examples of Russian innovation emerge throughout our history. For instance, in the 19th century the inventor Dimitri Mendeleev literally cleaned up chemistry.

Before Mendeleev came along, chemistry was an inexact science. It was known that mixing certain chemicals produced certain reactions – but nobody was entirely sure why.

Mendeleev’s disruptive idea was to suggest that there were no more than eight groups of elements. All the elements in each group shared characteristics. This simple idea turned an art into a science. It was called the Periodic Table, and it was officially unveiled before the Russian Chemical Society in March 1869.

You can see what I mean when I suggest that innovation is in our blood. It explains why, in 1950s, the Soviet Union introduced a special holiday: the Professional Day of Inventors and Innovators. There was even a prize (created as a Soviet response to the Nobel Prize) awarded to the most innovative ideas. The solemn ceremony took place every year on the 26th of June.

More recently, we’ve continued to take pride in our disruptive approach to science. Some time ago an interesting fact was published online: “Americans spent one million dollars creating a pen that will write in zero-gravity conditions. Soviet cosmonauts just use pencils.”

In this series of posts, Tatyana Strashnenko (Strategic Planning Director TBWA\Moscow) celebrates Russian innovation with disruption stories from the country’s past and present.

Resourcefulness is one of the key traits of the Russian mentality.  Since life has never been easy and the state has always tended to smother initiative rather than stimulating it, we’ve had no choice but to innovate. The saying “necessity is the mother of invention” could have been coined for us.

One of our most famous novels, of course, is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Perhaps this is not surprising, because in battle, Russians have often been innovative. They’ve disrupted conventional military theory and defeated superior forces with unexpected tactics.

Perhaps the best example was the decision by General Kutuzov in 1812 to leave Moscow open to Napoleon. After the brutal battle of Borodino, the Russian army was in no state to defend the city. And so it was quite literally abandoned. Napoleon entered a dead metropolis. The few remaining provisions soon ran out. Napoleon was forced to move further south, where he was met and defeated by a fortified and morally superior Russian force. Kutuzov had been criticised for abandoning Moscow – but his unconventional strategy won the day.

On a lighter note, in peacetime Russians are famous for being able to make practically any object out of the materials at hand. Cotton, cable and a box of matches will get you an electric water heater. A record can be copied onto an X-ray photograph. And there is practically no car part that can’t be replaced by something concocted from a few items bought in a hardware store.

Humorists say that this is why Russians are not afraid of any crisis or calamity. Click here for examples.

Check again later for the two posts to follow.

Jean-Marie Dru, the inventor of the Disruption philosophy and chairman of TBWA, will share his ideas on Disruption at the prestigious State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow this Wednesday. The lecture will be public.

Influential business thinkers commented on Dru‘s idea, among them the founder and chairman of the Virigin Group, Richard Branson, who said „Disruption goes way beyond advertising, it forces you to think about where you want your brand to go and how to get there“. The bestselling author Tom Peters simply calls it the „most powerful idea in business today“. Now for the first time Dru share his insights in Russia.

Disruption is both a mind-set and a methodology that TBWA uses every day in developing ideas that help its clients find a completely original way of presenting a brand to the world. It is a driving success for brands, by collaboratively, collectively and systematically interrogating and challenging the conventional thinking that prevent so many brands and companies from succeeding.

Dru is not only the intellectual father of Disruption, he has also authored four books on advertising and marketing, including his latest publication “How Disruption Brought Order” (Palgrave, 2007), “Beyond Disruption” (John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2002), “Disruption” (John Wiley & Sons Inc.1996) and “Le Saut Créatif” (Lattès 1984).

Today Jean-Marie Dru is the chairman of TBWA, which has grown to be the 5th largest network in the world with more than 267 offices, in 77 countries and 12,000 employees. TBWA has been recognized by both Advertising Age and Adweek magazines as Global Agency of the Year in 2008 and by Creativity magazine as the most-awarded Agency Network. Fast Company listed TBWA last year among the 50 most innovative companies and named the company an „Innovation All-Star“ in 2010.

To sign up for a free ticket to the lecture by Jean-Marie Dru, simply send an e-mail to events@tbwa.ru including your name and company.

March 10, 2010, 11:00 am (doors open 10:30 am)

THE STATE TRETYAKOV GALLERY

Enter the building through Maly Tolmachevsky Pereulok 9, Moscow

Donald Gunn asked Jean-Marie Dru to contribute an essay to the latest edition of the Gunn Report, the only independent report on creativity for the advertising world. Enjoy Jean-Marie Dru’s thoughts on mad-blog.com:

The economic crisis on the one hand, the digital revolution on the other…

Our profession has never been so shaken. These two circumstances create multiple effects. And we are all wondering what tomorrow will look like.

Concerning digital, communications groups are developing varied, often opposing strategies. Some, through a series of acquisitions, attempt to create a technological barrier between them and their competitors. Others, like our Agency, are putting digital at the very center of their conventional activities. Neither strategy is, by definition, the winner. There are different ways to succeed. What makes a strategy effective is the quality of its implementation, and the commitment to it.

To ensure that everything starts with digital, the 180 agency in Amsterdam totally reinvented itself. The result of their actions was even more radical than they had imagined, and the price they paid was heavy, with no fewer than 55 out of their total 120 staff changing. This is a dramatic illustration of the size of the task. The path ahead is narrow, and it is difficult.

Too often, we are more comfortable talking about digital ideas than making the inherent changes that are necessary to provoke the right solutions in the digital world. As Colleen DeCourcy, our Chief Digital Officer, said to me recently: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

In an industry faced with such challenges, the relevance of award shows, and even The Gunn Report itself, comes under scrutiny. It is a recurring subject. I remember back in the ‘70s, industry colleagues who announced the imminent demise of the Cannes Festival. We know what it has since become. Its turnover increased tenfold, because today more than ever, the celebration of creativity is essential despite of the difficult environment in which we are operating, or rather, because of it. And it’s why, although they avoided awards shows for over 50 years, the world’s leading advertisers now participate actively in them, and celebrate when their own campaigns are recognized.

In a speech I gave in Cannes last year, I underlined that “Big can be beautiful too.” In 2007, both Procter & Gamble and Unilever were awarded a Grand Prix at this festival. Today, a lot of great work comes from large companies. They have internalized the fact that audiences are not captive anymore. If you don’t entertain and engage people, they will simply ignore you. “Safe advertising“ is becoming invisible. At last.

There’s no getting away from that fact that, today, creativity is no longer optional. It is vital to every product category and to every communications discipline.

In fact, there are two factors that are contributing to put creativity in the center. On the one hand, the imminent demise of repetitive advertising, and on the other, the understanding that each and every touchpoint between a brand and its audiences must be creative.

Advertising is part of how brands behave, but brands are judged on everything they do, not just how they appear in advertising.

We need to embrace all the ways to tell a brand’s story: its packaging, its retail presence, the content of its website, its PR programs, the products themselves. And to ensure that everything is creative. This is why, even when an agency is not directly in charge of one of these elements, it must nevertheless feel a sense of responsibility. There can be no room for compromise or mediocrity if you have the ambition to be a brand leader. Advertising agencies will rediscover their original reason for being; they will again become true generalists.

But contrary to the past, they will only achieve this if they learn how to change rhythm. The problem is no longer just to ensure the coherence between the different elements of a brand’s communication, which some continue to refer to as 360°. But rather, to feed a constant conversation with our audiences, 365 days a year. From 360 to 365…it is the very rhythm of communications that digital has shaken up. Agencies need to move from a quarterly to a daily cadence.

We have to organize ourselves to deliver constant communications. A fleet of small initiatives coming together to create an ongoing communication program, generating more frequent conversation points. We need to own these conversations, not just the creative work.

Read more…

Great brands are mad. They are mad in both senses of the word. On the one hand they break conventions, ignoring the conventional wisdom of their industry. Some might call this insane.

On the other hand, great brands have to be angry sometimes. Angry about the status quo. Angry that their products may still not be good enough. Angry that they’re not providing their audience with enough entertainment.

That’s why they’re constantly striving to improve their brand behavior. Great brands care about what they do – in everything they do.

The concepts of Media Arts and Disruption seem to be the best way to create success for brands. I am sure that some of the most admired brands in the world understand this. Some do it naturally, others have incorporated that way of working after experiencing how their performance in the market has changed after doing so.

Great brands have a clear belief-system, and they have a vision about their future. But they also understand the value of three fundamental thoughts that lead everything they do:

(1) They don‘t hunt for target groups. They entertain an audience.

(2) They know that the HOW and the WHERE are as important as the WHAT for a brand.

(3) They say good-bye to 360 degrees communication and welcome the 365 day approach of constant communication.

This changes dramatically how they behave in the world: these brands are artists in the way they use media.

For one year we have been celebrating big disruptive ideas as well as outstanding examples of brand behavior. More than 7.500 people have signed up to our feed and the incredible number of 4.500 individuals have visited the blog more than 200 times. Thank you all very very much.

Let‘s continue to be mad.

Ulrich

TBWA Worldwide has been recognized by Fast Company as an Innovation All-star. As part of the Most Innovative Companies issue, the 59 Innovation All-stars were culled from past Top 50 honorees, as companies that have “fought a dour economy with renewed creativity and bold initiatives.” TBWA Worldwide was first cited in Fast Company’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2009.

The Innovation All-stars report specifically calls out TBWA for getting “huge props for its work over the past 10 years – Adweek called “Get a Mac” the Campaign of the Decade; and iPod “Silhouettes” the Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade. Ad Age named TBWA the decade’s third-best agency also citing its work for Pedigree and Mars.”

Fast Company’s annual Most Innovative Companies issue honors major brands including Cisco, Disney, and GE along with such rising newcomers as Spotify, Gilt Groupe, HTC, and the Indian Premier League. Facebook leads the annual ranking of the Top 50, after growing its user-base from 150 million to 350 million in just one year.

Overall, Fast Company recognized 250 plus companies, including more than 75 non-U.S. businesses.

To create this year’s Most Innovative Companies issue, Fast Company’s editorial team analyzed information on thousands of businesses across the globe. The result is a package unlike that of any other business media. It’s not just about revenue growth and profit margins; it’s about identifying creative models and progressive cultures – to define the many forms of innovation that exist across the business landscape.

“It was invigorating to engage with so many exciting new ideas and developments,” said Fast Company editor Robert Safian.  “Our goal was to offer a snapshot of the creativity at work in the global marketplace, and to inspire the Fast Company audience with illustrations of how powerful and effective business can be.”

Something smells different at Old Spice. P&G is not exactly saying that Old Spice body wash will make your man smell like a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but that’s clearly what we’re meant to infer. It will be interesting to see how this ironic tone will affect the brand behavior of Old Spice. Will it be available in hardware stores and sports outlets?

Actually, we’re afraid that it still will be sold in the good old drugstore around the corner.

Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Below, you’ll see a video, narrated by Jeremy and Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, who led our tablet team, that shows more. It explains why the tablet is such a groundbreaking opportunity for magazines such as WIRED.

As Chris Anderson continues in his blog EPICENTER on wired.com continues: much is still to be answered about magazines and other media on this emerging class of devices, from the business and distribution models to the consumer response. But what is already clear is that they offer the opportunity to be beautiful, highly engaging and immersive, going beyond what’s available on the web.

Is this the future of magazines? No, I guess it’s a future scenario for media brands.

WIRED’s future is digital and a perfect example that reflects how people today and even more tomorrow will digest media. It will change how content is consumed and it will change how brands have to behave.

But one thing is not changing: The people that edit great content, people that manage to entertain and audience, people that curate content and have great creative ideas are back in power. That is a bright future for our trade.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.