But as a brand that believes every generation can refresh the world, they wanted to change something. The decision was radical. No Super Bowl ad, but 20 million US dollars to fund projects that would make the world a fresher place. People where invited to submit their projects, and the whole world could vote. The budget for a one day event now funds a full year of causes. 1000 submissions are accepted every month, but when the Pepsi Refresh Project was launched this figure was achieved after 2 minutes. Since then, over one billion media contacts have been generated during the first twelve weeks of the project – and as the web buzz continues, even more staggering numbers are round the corner. But the numbers are only one side of the coin. More importantly, this campaign is producing value every day. Value for the community, value for the planet and, last but not least, value for Pepsi in the hearts and minds of its audience.

For question and further information simply email Carisa Bianchi.

This isn’t an ad. This is an idea. A big one. It was conceived to be the ultimate product demo. Here’s how it goes. What if you took two rival high school football teams and had them replay a significant game…15 years later. The teams would need to train and get back in shape. And oh yeah, they’d need plenty of Gatorade. Two teams on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border did this. Here’s the trailer, but got to MissionG.com to see more of the story. Also FOX has turned it into a series. You’ll find more info on that here.

In a terrible blow to the ad industry’s carbon footprint, most people collecting Cannes Lions this year will have to fly over from the US.  American agencies have the budgets, the chutzpah and the easy familiarity with digital to pull off the campaigns the rest of the world wants to make.  Expect Team America to do better in South France than South Africa this year.

My self-serving full-disclosure prediction is that Pepsi Refresh and Gatorade Replay will challenge for top Titanium and Integrated Lions.  Both campaigns managed to give their brands a genuine role in the world, touching on some real human truths along the way.  Gatorade Rematch could edge it as it will touch the hearts of every alpha male viewer.  As soon as you see that Rematch gives former high school athletes a shot at redemption, Gatorade gets up there with The Wrestler and Jerry Maguire. Asked in an interview what made him cry, Sean Connery answered ‘athletics’.  Expect a similar reaction here.

DDB Stockholm’s Fun Theory campaign for the VW Golf could put in a strong showing.  ‘What if we spent the budget behind enabling people to have fun?’ is a pleasing conjecture for a global audience but it’s a bit too generic compared to the competition.

This year should see more maturity in the Cyber and Titanium Lions.  We won’t see any more funny-shaped barcodes walking off with big prizes.  Now it’s the turn of smart uses of existing technology to triumph over the novelties.  Having digital native Bob Greenberg chairing the Titanium Lions Jury will help here.   So we should see Tribal DDB’s rendering of Monopoly on Google Maps or Crispin Porter’s Twitter-based customer service Twelpforce getting recognition.

Film Lions could be a contest of old school craft against new school laughs as BBH’s The Man Who Walked Around The World vies for honours with W&K’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. The astonishing level of craft and performance in the Johnnie Walker epic should see the man in the kilt edging out the man ON A HORSE.

So that’s 2010.  In the interest of playing the prediction game, I prophesize that Nike’s Write The Future will storm the 2011 Film Lions, assuming any of the featured players escape the curse of Nike and are still standing by the end of the World Cup.

It was a significant entry into the carbon emissions reduction arena with what was sure to have a major impact on the conversation. A conversation, which at that time lacked a common thread for people to follow and rally around.

The immediate opportunity for Nissan was to own the global conversation around mobility. Not simply from a new product standpoint, but from the standpoint of a new mobility lifestyle — a lifestyle preparing the world for a new kind of car.

The TBWA\Digital Arts Team, led by Colleen DeCourcy, was asked to cultivate this conversation and give it a place to live online. The teams generated thinking around celebrating zero emissions mobility, the coming of the electric vehicle revolution and how this can be a central part of a common journey to a sustainable future. In response, they created, ‘Journey to Zero.’

Under the watchful tutelage of Richard Saul Wurman, global thought leader, TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference founder, author and the planet’s premier information architect, journeytozero.com became a platform for this ongoing conversation.

The Digital Artists started by partnering with Wade Davis, noted anthropologist, ethno-botanist, best-selling author and National Geographic Explorer documenting his conversations, observations and experiences at COP15 – the United Nations 2009 Climate Change Conference. Using the above, the team pushed content to consumers in real time starting a global conversation around change.

Constant Communications was the mechanic employed to reach consumers through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous, and on journeytozero.com. Almost immediately after starting the conversation, it grew in bounds. Not only did the program gain great momentum with the consumer audience, but zero emissions and green leaders and influencers also engaged in perpetuating and growing the conversation.

The initiative was not created to sell the Nissan LEAF directly; however, one can imagine that there will be a residual effect now that so many consumers were engaged in the program and have a new mindset around zero emissions and mobility. It is a journey Nissan initiated, and one that is so important to the future of mobility.

In the words of Wade Davis, “The very existence of alternative ways of thinking and doing are what will save us — hence being aware of diversity and new ways are what will drive the future of sustainability.”

In 2008, TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles was tasked to reignite the spark both in the Gatorade brand and in those who drink it. Because of the brand’s tremendous growth over the years, it was starting to lose its core sports relevance as consumers forgot Gatorade’s fundamental reason for being – superior sports hydration that fuels athletic performance. The brand was losing its meaning and in danger of becoming more akin to soda pop than sports drink.

In talking with athletes of all ages, the team found that whatever they do, wherever they go, the best athletes always take their attitude, swagger and passion with them. They may lose a step here or there, gain a few pounds as they age, but the one thing that doesn’t change is their competitive desire and will to win.

They tool inspiration from the fact that rivalries have fueled athletes throughout the history of sport and asked, what if Gatorade used a sporting rivalry as a catalyst to give one-time athletes a second chance?

Two U.S. high schools, Easton High School in Pennsylvania and Phillipsburg High School in New Jersey, have a 100-year-old rivalry and, in 1993, were named by Sports Illustrated as the best high school football rivalry in the country. However, the 1993 meeting between the two teams ended in the worst possible way, a 7-7 deadlock. No true rivalry should ever end in a tie.

Here was the brand’s opportunity. Fuel a grudge match. Provide the original players a second chance to play the ‘93 game and settle the score once and for all…15 years later: Gatorade “REPLAY” was born.

Gatorade REPLAY originated as a five-part online documentary. Cameras captured every part of the 90-day journey, from the physical workouts to the deeply emotional moments and the relationships built on and off the field. Gatorade’s expertise in coaching, hydration and sports performance supported the men as they re-evaluated their health, got back in shape and fine-tuned their skills. Then came the REPLAY.

On Sunday, April 26, 2009, 15,000 fans jammed Fisher Field. Tickets for the REPLAY game sold out in 90 minutes, putting the 15,000-seat stadium at maximum capacity. Demand for the game spilled over into the eBay grey market, with some auctions fetching up to six times the ticket’s face value. Even NFL Gatorade athletes Peyton and Eli Manning took part as assistant coaches for the event. The entire Easton and Phillipsburg towns became participants – and in addition to the teams, the original ’93 cheerleaders and marching band members came out of retirement. Suddenly whole towns were transformed into fans, helping fuel the rivalry and cheer on the teams. The game was broadcast live to local markets with the rest of the country joining in online on www.gatorade.com.

The REPLAY winners were Phillipsburg, but it hardly mattered. Gatorade had made their mark and proved their role as a catalyst for athletic achievement.

Further testament to the size and power of the idea, in November 2009 REPLAY became a documentary television series with a one-hour primetime pilot airing nationally on Fox Sports Net during Thanksgiving weekend. We have received requests to turn the documentary into a feature film from all the major studios and we are currently filming Season II in Detroit, to be broadcast on Fox Sports Net.

From a social and cultural point of view,  THEY ARE THE BIG DEAL.  They will change the way you interact with social networks and how you surf the internet forever, how brands can target consumers and will challenge the dominance of Google as being the most powerful company online.  In fact in year from now any website which has not incorporated these changes, will look very archaic.

WHY IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU INTERACT WITH THE WEB AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social networking will no longer happen just in social networks  it will happen on every site of the internet.  Imagine being on any website and being able to “like” that site by simply clicking a button, whether that is an article, a band, a song.  You will be able to leave comments on that site, see what your friends have done on that site, what they think of the content on that site and you will even be able to see which of your friends are currently on that site, and connect with them on that site.

But then imagine going onto another site, and because your likes and activities have been remembered, the site becomes personalised to your tastes or to your friends tastes, or it even suggests stuff that people who liked similar things to you also like (this is the beginning of the “semantic web”), so if you have “liked” various artists/ bands across various sites – by the time you get to a music streaming site like Pandora, it will generate a playlist automatically of songs you might like.

When you do go onto Facebook itself, it will suggest communities you should join of people who also like the same things as you and let you connect with them and share ideas and interests.

Facebook have also introduced their own currency called “Facebook Credits” which allows one payment system across all app.  So you will not need to have separate accounts for payment across Farmville or 1-800 Flowers, but a seamless centralised payment system like ITunes, a seamlessness which will make commerce take off on Facebook in a big way. [I can see print publications developing Facebook editions which will be powered by these micro-payments.]

WHY IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY BRANDS TARGET CONSUMERS

Facebook have made it piss easy for brands to integrate these social features into a website: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins

We will probably see a shift in branded experiences taking place on proprietary microsites and no longer having to be in social networks.

A brand will now know how popular parts of their site experience are, which bit of content are the most relevant.  Not only this they will know the demographics and maybe even the locations of audiences engaging with their site, as well as how they are engaging.   This will open up developing more attitude based advertising.  Wherever consumers go on the web, they will carry their preferences, behaviours and friends with them.

And this is WHY FACEBOOK WILL CHALLENGE THE DOMINANCE OF GOOGLE

Google has a massive advertising and search platform based on keywords.  Facebook is creating an advertising and search platform which is based on behaviors, attitudes, preferences and social connections [what your friends like and do etc], this allows the creation of more powerfully targetted relevant advertising and experiences.

These for me were the big out takes as people who work in marketing.  For more information you can watch the keynote in full here.

“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.”

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

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.

Otherwise said, in this digital era, traditional agencies will only succeed if they adopt the rhythm of the pure players. And as for these, they will need to learn, or rather to understand, how brands are built. These two symmetrical challenges are vital for the agencies concerned. The challenge for so-called conventional agencies is immense. The challenge for the pure players appears to me even more formidable.

Agencies need to repatriate part of the media thinking process. We can no longer think of media as numbers on a spreadsheet or a list of options for places to buy our audiences’ attention. We can no longer think of media as just a means for brands to talk at consumers, but rather as all the places, spaces and experiences where people live their lives. “Media” does not have to be paid for, and it does not have to be measurable to matter to our audiences. In essence, media is any space between an idea and the audience.

It is time for advertising agencies not to be media neutral anymore, but to be media passionate. It is time to grow ideas that turn brands into media themselves.

The industry adopted “Communications Planning” as a way of describing this. A new discipline, at the crossroads of audience planning and connection planning. We do not talk to “consumers” anymore, we talk to audiences who are marketing savvy, who know the brands, who respect them and who program their own media lives. Today, each of us plans his own daily itinerary through all these “media” solicitations. We need to understand the members of our audiences, how they connect with the world, how they digest media and all the technology that surrounds them…

If we treat people like “consumers,” we are interrupting what they are interested in to talk to them about our brand. If we treat people like an “audience,” we become what they are interested in, and become an integral part of them.

As for Connections Planning, it is much more than just a tool for allocation of resources. It is about understanding the interaction between all the different points of contact, rather than just the impact of these individual contact points.

This is why, as an illustration of this, we often discuss the magic triangle formed by advertising/event/digital.

Each of these three elements rebounds off the two others. Like a kind of ricochet. Back and forth between the real and virtual worlds. An event created in the street is picked up and circulated on the net and nourishes the brand idea developed in the advertising. Or the other way around, a community receives a text message on its mobile that provokes a reaction in real life. Or another case, where an event can become content for both offline and online advertising. The virtual decouples the effects of the real, and the real gives substance, life to the virtual. Brand conversations are organized around these exchanges. And the role of agencies is to organize and feed these conversations. To enrich the brand story, on a daily basis.

In other words, the way media is used has become a creative issue. And from now on, every advertising agency presentation should start with media.

At TBWA, we regroup all these thoughts and practices under one expression. We call it Media Arts. Because we believe each point of contact must tell the brand story gracefully, artfully.

Whatever they choose to call it, however they approach this new discipline, traditional agencies, the big networks, cannot ignore this new reality. There is only one way to define brand behavior, and that is to integrate everything, and do this in a creative way.

Our mission is to design brand behaviors to serve brand beliefs. Agile brand behaviors, to support brave brand beliefs.

And it is here, digital revolution or not, that nothing has changed. Our business has always been to build brands, to give them more sense and substance. It is up to our agencies to imagine and to formulate what these brand beliefs are.

At TBWA, this is the role of Disruption. Disruption is about brand belief, whereas Media Arts is about brand behavior.

Most often, this brand belief is encapsulated in a few precise words. A few examples I know well are: “Think Different, Shift, Impossible is Nothing, Dogs Rule, In an Absolut World, Go Visa…” Agencies’ true reason for being is to bring to life the meaning that resides in these words. This ability to express in a few words what a brand stands for, what impact it can have, what the brand believes in. In fact, in this ever-changing world of content and clutter, brands with a clear point of view are more valuable than ever.

These few words that “say the brand” will be the starting point for storytelling. They are at the same time the source of creative inspiration and the strategic backbone for all the communications plans. Today, more than ever, in a fragmented world where everyone is seeking signposts, we need big central ideas that serve as lighthouses. As Lee Clow said recently: “Big ideas win, good ads don’t.”

Agencies are experts at distilling a thought into just a few words. To understand the essence of a brand, to give it a larger share of the future, to share the idea with all the brand’s audiences, this is, and will always be, our role.

To achieve this, we have at our disposal today a multitude of means of expression. So many new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences available to us to deliver the brand story. The consequence is that creative output is increasing exponentially in quantity. Where we used to produce 30-second formats, we now have to think in terms of websites, blogs, e-webs, digital radio, SMS conversations, social media on the web, street events, PR, and a whole array of new communications opportunities.

On the financial side, the implications of all this are critical for the future of our industry. More content produced in more different ways should result in more fees to conceive it all. However, with the crisis as an excuse, the trend is rather the opposite.

The stakes are clear: thanks to the interactions between all the disciplines, to the digital boom, we know that we can achieve levels of effectiveness with partially lower “media” investment. At the same time, we need to increase our creative resources. Depending on the agency, the cost of these represents only about 2% (between 1% and 3%), of the clients’ overall investment: a very few percentage points that can obviously have a huge leverage effect on the value of the total 100% investment. It is vital that our clients understand that a part, albeit minor, of the savings made in media investment should be reinvested in creative resources. This, for them, is where the true creation of value lies.

1 or 2% more…this is the necessary condition for a total transformation of our industry. Because the creative revolution we are embarked upon needs to be funded. There is no other option for our clients than to contribute to making this happen. They will be the first to benefit.

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