Jean-Marie Dru, the inventor of Disruption and Chairman TBWA Worldwide delivered today a speech at the State Tretyakov Gallery on the occasion of the official housewarming of TBWA Moscow. Here are some sound-bites for all of you who couldn’t attend:
“We are in the grip of a terrible recession. And recessions are always times when we isolate and withdraw into ourselves, when we do not take risks, when we become more cautious.
And yet every day you ask yourself: how to grow, how to create more organic roles at a time when you have less resources.
This is where we can contribute. This is where creativity can contribute. Provided that creativity focuses in the right direction.”
In his first public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru covered three areas, that he believes are essential for the future of our business: (1) Brand Ideas (2) Brand Initiatives and (3) Brand Content.
“First I will underline the importance of brand ideas, then the fact that brands must take more and more initiatives, and last but not least that brands must create new content.
At his return to the company in 1997, Steve Jobs decided to remind the world of what Apple stood for. You all know the “Think Different” film, it works as well today as it did 10 years ago.
This film has stood the test of time. It works just as effectively at the depths of the worst crisis we have never known. In fact, it may even be more inspirational today
You surely know that the person behind that film is Lee Clow, the creative soul of TBWA. He is at the origin of all our campaigns for Apple. And here is what Lee likes to say on ideas such as Think Different: Brand Ideas Win, Good Ads Don’t.
What he means by this is that we cannot be satisfied merely with advertising ideas. What is needed now are big brand ideas.”
“In fact, communications strategies can sometimes contribute to reinforcing companies’ business strategies. By “reinforce”, I mean that strong communications can create great enthusiasm and more conviction around the companies’ strategic direction. And this happens more often than we think.”
“The old saying « actions speak louder than words » has never been more true. And that’s why we’re not just in the business of telling brands what to say, but also in the business of guiding them in how they should behave. (…) All initiatives that go beyond the mere products and services you brand delivers, initiatives that reinforce what a brand stands for.”
“My last point is that we are going to create more and more brand content. This is a consequence of the end of repetitive advertising.
So we have to come with unexpected or entertaining ways of communicating. All the stunts we are doing for adidas are good examples.
The first one is a billboard campaign in New Zealand for the All Blacks. A drop of blood taken from each player on the team – thirty of them in all – was mixed into the ink used to print the posters.
You can imagine the impact in a country where each citizen sees himself as an All Black. Rather than just being a slogan, “Impossible is Nothing” is actually a declaration that you’re ready for anything. Like playing vertical football: Slide One CNN journalist called it “Sky soccer”.
“For the soccer World Cup in Germany, Slide the Cologne train station ceiling was painted in the style of a Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, featuring the world’s greatest players. And we also built this huge bridge with Germany’s famous goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn, at the exit of the Munich airport. This gives you an idea of the scale of the installation.
Then, at the last European football cup, we imagined this spectacular representation of the Czech goalkeeper, on the giant wheel in Vienna made famous by Orson Welles. The goalkeeper was able to stop all the shots thanks to his numerous arms.”
“We should not underestimate the importance of ideas like these. They accelerate the penetration of the central idea. More than that – they bring it to life. And they make it bigger. And the bigger the idea, the stronger the brand.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Acclaimed filmmaker Spike Jonze premieres his latest work – I’m Here, a 30-minute short film – at the Sundance Film Festival this month as part of the first-ever Opening Night’s Shorts Program at the festival. The film is a collaboration with ABSOLUT VODKA, and the partnership acknowledges the brand’s position as a pioneering and culture-shaping brand. ABSOLUT has always stood out in the marketplace as a groundbreaking company that has been supporting artists for decades. Previous collaborations include those with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Helmut Newton. I’m Here honors the brand’s history while embarking on a new and innovative alliance with one of today’s most original filmmakers. The film came about when TBWA\Chiat\Day New York and ABSOLUT reached out to Jonze to make a film, and gave him creative control to create the film he wanted.
Read more about this groundbreaking project from TBWA’s New York office, and see the :60 trailer after the jump. Read more…
John Hunt is an award-winning playwright, author, and Worldwide Creative Director of TBWA. He presented his new book “The Art of the Idea” in a presidents lecture at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. Prior the festive event he had a personal conversation with Michael Conrad. Join the insightful conversation.
(Part One)
(Part Two)
Hunt was born in Zambia and educated in England and South Africa, he was the Creative Founding Partner of TBWA Hunt Lascaris. TBWA Hunt Lascaris has now grown to be South Africa’s premier advertising agency – named Agency of the Year six times in the last seven years. In 1993 John was intimately involved in Nelson Mandela’s first ANC election campaign. Three years later, he joined the South African Advertising Hall of Fame – the first working creative to be so honored, and in 1997 he received the Financial Mail’s Long Term Achievement Award.
TBWA has been named by Adweek magazine as the “Global Advertising Agency Network of the Year” in both 2007 and again for 2009. Led by CEO (and Berlin School Board of Governors member) Jean-Marie Dru, the full-service agency has more than 250 offices in 77 countries. Some of its major clients include Adidas, Absolut Vodka, Apple, Henkel, Mars, Nissan, and Sony PlayStation.
Fortune Magazine named him “Master of Disruption” in 2006. Now he has been named “CEO of the Decade” by the same publication. Steve Jobs has turned around basically everything he and Apple touched over the last years: personal computing, how people enjoy music and how the stay connected on the move. By using digital technology in way that it helps and entertain human beings, he was the key driver of one of the most amazing success stories in business.
Check out Steve Jobs’ hits and misses in an amazing online timeline. Click here.
Fred Vogelstein reported in 2006 in Fortune Magazine: “Apple’s trick has been not just its game-changing tech breakthroughs (music and computers made easy) but its relentless push to disrupt itself before others have a chance to do so. “The thing that most people don’t realize about Steve is that he is not only really good at taking technology and turning it into good-looking, easy-to-use products, he’s really good at doing it faster than anyone else,” says Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto.”
Consumers who have never picked up an annual report or even a business magazine gush about his design taste, his elegant retail stores, and his outside-the-box approach to advertising. (“Think different,” indeed.)
Fortune Magazine says: “It’s as if his signature “one more thing” line now applies to him as well.” So, let’s wait for the next chapters of “one more thing”. But first, check out some of the most iconic examples of Apples brand behavior, some advertising developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day and TBWA\Media Arts Lab.
“We are in the grip of a terrible recession. And recessions are always times when we isolate and withdraw into ourselves, when we do not take risks, when we become more cautious.
Then, at the last European football cup, we imagined this spectacular representation of the Czech goalkeeper, on the giant wheel in Vienna made famous by Orson Welles. The goalkeeper was able to stop all the shots thanks to his numerous arms.”
