Dr. Sven H. Becker, CEO of TBWA Germany on why disruption is about so much more than advertising.

What is your personal view of disruption?

Many people outside the agency associate disruption purely with advertising, which is a very one-dimensional way of looking at it. Of course we produce disruptive advertising at TBWA, but that is only one facet of what we do. Disruption is a much broader philosophy that has far bigger implications for brands and their behaviour, not all of which is visible from the outside.

Do you still think of yourself as working in advertising?

I don’t even think I work at an advertising agency! That’s what we were about 25 years ago. Today our job is to help companies take their brands in exciting new directions.

Can you give me some examples?

The classic example is Pedigree, which we transformed from a brand that made dog food into a brand that loves dogs. That insight produced some great creative work – but more importantly it changed the behaviour of the entire company: employees were given permission to bring their dogs into work, and so on. More recently, our work with Nivea has enabled the company to look beyond traditional concepts of beauty. Most beauty brands have a very superficial, external view of beauty. But Nivea presents beauty as a state of mind. Not to forget that both companies outperform their category.

It must be quite a challenge, meeting a company and saying: “We’re going to change the way you think.”

Well, of course we work in partnership with them. We don’t just come up with an idea and force it on them. Disruption is a step-by-step process. We work together to unlock the ideas that were lying dormant within their brands. Disruption is about identifying the self-imposed restrictions that can stifle creativity. We call these restrictions “conventions“. The “disruptive idea“ is one that overturns these conventions and allows a company to adopt a unique standpoint, which we call the “vision“. From that, they discover a new truth about their brand, referred to as the “brand belief“. This is a fundamental statement about the brief and should guide all aspects of communication all “brand behavior“.

Clients find this process liberating – it’s as if they’ve discovered something that they were instinctively aware of all along, but were unable to formulate and put into action. We free those ideas and then polish and shape them.

Not all clients are comfortable with the idea of change.

True, and I would never say that disruption is for everyone. A client that wants to carry on doing the same thing year after year without testing new possibilities – and the increased success that those might bring – is probably not the client for us.

The same goes for clients who don’t want to look beyond conventional advertising?

Classic media – TV, print and radio – still have their place, but they are playing a reduced role within the bigger picture. Audiences now receive messages from many different places, so part of our job is to steer clients towards solutions that they might never have considered before. We refer to as Media Arts.

TBWA still makes traditional ads, though?

Traditional advertising is only one of many Media Arts skills. In the past, advertising was all about interrupting or begging for the audience’s attention. But that’s not what we do at all. Our job is to engage audiences in new and unexpected ways, through a wide variety of media. Actually we consider everything between brand and its audience media, just remember what we did for Labello during the New Years Celebrations earlier this year at Times Square New York and the Berlin Brandburg Gate and how we turned the these parties into the celebrations of kissing.

It’s almost as though you’re saying that brands must be more respectful of audiences.

I feel there’s a new seriousness within the industry. Today’s communications professionals should not be interested in artificial, short-term solutions. They should solve problems for clients in a durable way. That’s why we use disruption to form the brand belief and media arts to change brand behaviour rather than just to inspire witty ads. The end result is ultimately more sophisticated and, inevitably, a richer and more rewarding experience for consumers.

You come from a planning background. What difference does that make now you’re running an agency?

I can’t speak for others, but I believe my job is to take clients degree by degree out of their comfort zone. And as a planner rather than an account man I may find it easier to do that. I’m less concerned with diplomacy. I don’t mind pushing clients towards a path that they might resist a little at first when it’s in the interest of the brand.

And what about the agency employees?

Well, my goal is simply to hold everyone at the agency to account and ensure that we apply the philosophy of disruption to everything we do. That’s not a constraint. Disruption is not a series of rules, but a way of looking at the world differently. Once you accept that, it’s very liberating: anything becomes possible. Disruption gives everybody the chance to make a contribution to our client’s success.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Dr. Sven H. Becker.

Rob Schwartz is the Chief Creative Officer of TBWA\CHIAT\DAY in Los Angeles He writes an “Inspiration is Everywhere” to the LA creative department every week. Sometimes, he shares them with us:

Amigos,

“Baby Paul” Cullen

This week I was inspired by two pieces of Skate culture.

First was the news of the death of “Baby Paul” Cullen, one of the world’s greatest skateboarders and beloved “mascot” of Venice Beach’s own original Zephyr team aka the Z-Boys.

The second bit of skate inspiration was an amazing piece of skateboard art featuring the incomparable, yet incongruous Miles Davis Quintet. (Yes, Jazz and Skateboards. Who’d a thunk?)

As a mediocre skateboarder who rode a Sims deck with ACS trucks and Sims Pure Juice wheels, I’ve always been inspired by the Z-Boys from Dogtown.

The original Z-Boys were a rag-tag group of skaters in the 1970’s who rose up near where the Chiat/Day building sits today. This part of Venice was not the chi-chi, sushi-slurping, yoga and mocha-latte mecca it is today. Back in the day, it was a grimy, tough part of Venice known as “Dogtown.” And guys like Nathan Pratt, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta slapped boards on trucks and wheels and used this bit of concrete dog-patch as their very own amusement park.

In fact, this was the beginning of the Dogtown style — driving, low-slung and downright aggressive. And the Z-Boys dominated the boardwalk of Pacific Ocean Park, rumbled through the streets of West LA and defied gravity in nearly every empty swimming pool in between. (There’s a terrific documentary on the Z-Boys and the whole D-town phenomenon, directed by original Zephyr Stacy Peralta called, no surprise, “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” (If you haven’t seen it, you simply must.)

What I find so inspiring about “Baby Paul” and his older Z-brothers was their incredible impact on culture. From nothing but a few guys “sidewalk surfing,” Skateboarding is now a $4.8 billion dollar market. It boasts over 11million participants. And it has spawned the empires of Tony Hawk, Volcom, RVCA, Hurley, and Zoo York (to name but a few).

What’s more, we now have skateboard parks, skateboard stores, skateboard magazines, skateboard blogs and skateboard icons in all manner of movies, TV shows, video games and of course most recently, Tillman, the Skateboarding Dog. (Over 8 million hits and counting.)

And if pop culture isn’t enough, there’s high culture in the form of Skateboard Art. As I mentioned earlier, fine artist Ian Johnson recently created 5 exceptional decks featuring Miles Davis and his band. And there have been brilliant pieces created over the last three decades by people like Evan Hecox (founder of “Chocolate”), Johnny Mojo, and the man who started it all, Jim Phillips. (Again, these are but a few of the artists who choose skateboard decks as a canvas.)

All of which brings me back to “Baby Paul.” Sure, he died young. But the his inspiration is everywhere, and will be with us for a long, long time.

Thanks for reading.

~Rob

For more ore on “Baby Paul” http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/dtown/cullen.html

More on Miles Davis Quintet Decks via Boing Boing – http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/25/miles-davis-quintet.html

Tillman, The Skateboarding Dog – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0

Ian Johnson stuff is here: http://www.ianmjohnson.com/

Skateboard art is here: http://www.disposablethebook.com/

See the “Dogtown and Z-Boy” trailer here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275309/

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Rob Schwartz.

The expert is 15 years and seven month. Matthew Robson is a intern at Morgan Stanley in London. He described in his report his friends’ media habits and created a serious buzz among media executives and beyond. And created an essential piece of information for brands that believe in the Media Arts idea developed and refined  by Lee Clow over the last years. It requires a deep understanding of how audiences digest media and the various crafts we can use to tell brand stories.

Check out what The Guardian reported about the Robson’s document and check out what the 15-year old has found out about the use of radio, television, newspapers, gaming, internet, directories, viral/outdoor marketing, music, cinema and the role of TV, mobile phones, computers or game consoles in the life of todays teens. Click here for full story.

Within the given context The Guardian published the following two lists:

What is hot?

• Anything with a touch screen is desirable.

• Mobile phones with large capacities for music.

• Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)

• Really big tellies

What is not?

• Anything with wires

• Phones with black and white screens

• Clunky ‘brick’ phones

• Devices with less than ten-hour battery life

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

To succeed a new museum today cannot limit itself to acquiring state-of-the-art objects for its collection to reach a loyal, interested audience – a museum today needs to immediately become a magnet for potential visitors, something new and inventive to get even the disinterested along.

The conventional way to achieve this? Acquire a bunch of eye catching and unique objects, create a better museum shop, modern architecture or modern facilities…

It would have been an easy way to turn a new aviation museum into another memorial that understands itself as a safeguard of history. Especially, when it is a museum that, by its name, stands for the history of aviation: The DORNIER MUSEUM FRIEDRICHSHAFEN.

The Dornier Museum team chose Disruption.

They didn’t want to develop a memorial, that tells people how things were. They didn’t want to display just a collection of interesting or nice-to-look-at things. They didn’t want just to appeal to just people interested in aviation. They wanted to leave those conventions behind.

A Disruption day helped to deep-dive into the company to look for its true identity: through its unique history with pioneers in aviation and space technology.  The result? We discovered its entrepreneurial success stretched into medical devices and many more technological domains.

But a museum should not just be retrospective; it should be also a starting point for imagining the future. People should not only encounter history through the Dornier behavior of the past, but also explore the world of today and tomorrow together.

In short: Dornier Museum became a place “Where great pioneers meet”.

Following this idea the DORNIER MUSEUM FRIEDRICHSHAFEN doesn’t just show airplanes and objects, but brings the pioneering attitude to life. Through fusing science and public, innovators and business; anywhere where history is a helpful driver to thinking for the future.

This positioning builds a bridge between passive and active, between contemplating and experiencing, between thinking and sharing: The DORNIER MUSEUM FRIEDRICHSHAFEN as such has become a place of the future, not to a memorial to the past.

If you have any comments please email Till Malchow.

It is hard to sell PlayStation consoles to male customers in their mid-30s. They are professionals. They have no time to play. But through research we learned most of them enjoy watching DVDs.

In 2003 PlayStation agreed with larger retailers to disrupt part of the retail strategy and moved the PS2 packages from the gaming section into the DVD player shelf. It worked. The guys were able to buy a politically correct DVD player, which works as a gaming console as well: the PlayStation®2.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Enjoy 100 people that definitely do not hide; the new web film “100 people per minute freestyle”. Shot in the Never Hide Films video booth during the 2009 SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email Walter Smith.

Luis Vuitton online campaign on NYT.com

Once again Louis Vuitton proofs great brand behavior by celebrating traveling at the highest level, following the simple idea: Some journeys change mankind forever. In the summer of the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing, Louis Vuitton celebrates the ultimate journey, in a new campaign featuring 79-year-old astronaut Buzz Aldrin and fellow space travellers Sally Ride and Jim Lovell. Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969.

The astronauts are the latest in a series of Vuitton spokespeople, among them Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve and Keith Richards, who have appeared in the brand’s “Core Values” campaign.

Check out the Luis Vuitton Journey.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Jewellery retailer Tiffany is rocking a new concept in California.

Shopping for jewellery is normally a detached experience. In order to handle the merchandise, you either need to ask an assistant – who goes through the laborious process of unlocking the glass case – or turn up with a mask, a pistol and a large hammer.

Taking a tip from Apple stores, US jewellery brand Tiffany & Co. has unveiled a new retail concept that aims to make shopping for baubles more relaxed. The concept made its debut in Glendale, California and is expected to roll out in up to 70 other branches. The jewels are still under glass, but the cases are not fully closed and customers can examine the items more easily.

Instead of adopting an aloof attitude, store employees are encouraged to think of themselves as “jewellery stylists”, dressing casually and urging customers to try pieces on. The company even looked at surf stores in California to see how a relaxed manner drives sales. In this way, it has shattered the convention of the hushed, imposing jewellery store. Only the most expensive Tiffany pieces – which can cost up to $42,000 – will remain under lock and key. Customers can pick up a bit of glitter from between $200 and $5,000. We think the idea rocks.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.