How did the book come about?

To a certain extent it was provoked by nostalgia. Fifteen years ago, when we founded Fast Company, we organized a meeting based around the premise “How do you overthrow successful companies?” The participants weren’t young dotcoms, but companies that were already large and successful, and wanted to consider ways of engaging with the exciting new landscape that was emerging around them. It struck me that you could organize the same meeting today and ask exactly the same question. The book is an attempt to answer it.

What for you then is the key to success? Is it enough to be disruptive?

It’s no longer enough to be pretty good at a lot of things. You goal should be excellence in a chosen field. The most local, the most global, the most exclusive…the point is to stand for something. Too many leaders want to stay in the middle of the road, which is the road to nowhere.

Thanks to the digital revolution, we live in an age of transparency. Do you find that the most disruptive companies are also the most authentic?

It’s certainly true that you can’t behave one way in the marketplace and another way internally. Your brand must be a reflection of your culture. In that context, your hiring policy and the way you treat your employees becomes vitally important. I’d even say that the “power couple” in this new environment are the marketers and human resources department, because your talent strategy and your brand strategy must be in synch.

Can you give a concrete example of this?

One of my favourite brands in the US is Zappos.com. In just ten years it has become an iconic brand, by doing something is banal as selling shoes on line. The way it uses customer service, performance and theatricality to make technology more human is outstanding. A lot of this is based on its hiring strategy. When you join the company, you embark on a five week training period. Then they offer you 5000 dollars to quit. It’s a way of acknowledging that the company isn’t for everyone, while ensuring that only those who are truly committed to the brand stay on. That’s just one of the reasons why it’s become a passion brand of the highest order. The staff believes in it as well as the customers.

Is being “practically radical” – or “disruptive” as TBWA would call it – essentially about taking risks?

During my research, I unearthed an academic study that identified two different forms of risk-taking. The first might be termed “sinking the boat”: taking a risk that didn’t work. But the second is “missing the boat”: failing to take a risk that might have worked. Too many leaders fail to innovate because they’re afraid of sinking the boat.

In advertising, there’s sometimes a feeling that originality requires big budgets. How do you feel about that?

If you look at any truly creative organization, it’s not about how deep their pockets are, but how original their ideas are. Once again, that stems from their people. And by the way, these people don’t have to work FOR you. It’s enough that they work WITH you. You need to find people who excel in their field and get them involved. It’s the team that counts – I’m a firm believer that you’re never as smart alone as you are together.

Having said that, there is an element of self-help to your book. Can individuals apply your ideas to themselves?

Absolutely. In the last third of the book I talk about how to become a high-impact individual in your field. Just like brands, we should all consider what we stand for and what legacy we want to leave.

TBWA is famous for its work with brands such as Apple and Pedigree. How do they fit in with the theme of your book?

For me, the key to Apple is that it decided that it was not going to be a company that introduced new electronic devices, but one that reshaped what was possible. It doesn’t allow what is currently known about technology to limit its imagination. Instead, it imagines the impossible and then endeavours to make it happen. It’s the ultimate example of starting with a blank sheet of paper.

Pedigree is a completely different example in that it’s a company with a long history. The temptation in this case is to disavow your past in order to carve out a new future. Instead, Pedigree rediscovered and reinterpreted its heritage. The company was started by people who genuinely loved dogs, but somehow over the years that message had gotten watered down.  All large but somewhat stodgy companies were based on an original innovative idea. Sometimes you need to go back to that idea in order to reinvigorate your business. Never be afraid to seek inspiration in your past.

Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry and Challenge Yourself, is published by William Morrow & Company.

For any comments or suggestions, send an email to Ulrich Proeschel.

A year ago, Lee Clow gave up the title of Chairman and Global Creative Director of TBWA Worldwide and designated himself Worldwide Director of Media Arts. In his first major interview since adopting the new role, he explains why brands must take an emotional approach to communications.

Lee warns that brands face becoming “irrelevant” or even “the focus of online contempt” if they fail to express a consistent identity every time they come into contact with consumers, whether it’s via advertising, packaging or the store experience.

“Finding the disruptive idea for a brand, which usually comes out of its emotional centre, and which we call the ´brand belief`, is the first step to creating a powerful multimedia brand”, he explains.

It used to be very simple.

Brands did advertising: they talked at people; they bought television commercials and held you captive. Now they must interact with their audience in a multifaceted but coherent way.

Everything a brand does is basically a medium and a message. And it needs to be true to a simple, single-minded idea. Using the example of Apple, Lee observes: “There isn’t a single thing Apple does that isn’t a message that confirms or reinforces how you feel about the company. I often tell people that the best ad we ever did was the Apple Store. We do great TV commercials, we do wonderful billboards, but you walk into an Apple store and you’re now immersed in a brand that’s going to change your life.”

“If you buy a product, even the process of opening it becomes a brand experience,” Lee emphasizes.
“Think about any brand that you like; any brand that you spend time with; any brand you go online and check out. It’s usually a brand that has touched you from a number of different points. Because it’s true to its character, you like and admire it. You actually want to go online and find out what’s going on, or if you drive by a billboard it reinforces how you feel about the brand.

“Successful brands are not cold: they have a soul, a character. But thanks to the power granted to consumers by the internet, brands that betray their characters risk getting slapped around”, says Lee.

“The reality of the new media world is that if your brand does not have a belief, if it does not have a soul and does not correctly architect its messages everywhere it touches consumers, it can become irrelevant. It can be ignored, or even become a focal point for online contempt. This insight lies behind the expression Media Arts. You are studying the science of how to bring brands to market. But I think you’d better keep your intuition, your instinct, and your emotional compass intact. Because the emotional centre, the belief of a brand, has to inform its behaviour, and this can’t all be done with the left side of the brain.”

“Ultimately”, concludes Lee, “You’re going out into the media world and creating something that I call art, it happens to be the art of communication. It’s storytelling.

“Great brands have a story, our job is to tell them.”

Nissan’s mobile ad campaign will feature the Nissan LEAF and incorporate a sweepstakes through which consumers can register to win a Nissan LEAF. The LEAF is the first affordable, mass market, 100% electric, zero-emission vehicle to hit the market.

You can view the demo below:

For question and further information simply email Carisa Bianchi.

Mr. Stengel is looking to reinvent marketing education along the way, scrapping most historical case studies for live ones presented by top creatives from BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day and executives from Dell, Procter & Gamble Co. and PepsiCo. He and Sanjay Sood, UCLA marketing professor and collaborator on the class, plan to pitch it as a model to the Harvard Business Review.

Part two in Mr. Stengel’s plan is his long-awaited book, set to be published by Crown Books next year, for which he’s enlisted a platoon of UCLA students, WPP’s Millward Brown and TBWA/Chiat/Day executives to help quantify and dissect the 50 brands that have added the most brand and financial value in the past decade and the purpose that drives them (hint: the top two are Google and Apple). The book’s working title is “Grow: How the World’s Best Businesses Use the Power of Ideals to Outshine the Competition.”

“When his book comes out, it’s going to be one of those touchstone books, and not just because we’re working on it,” said Rob Schwartz, executive creative director of TBWA. TBWA CMO Laurie Coots is the primary agency executive working on the book.

(Source: AdAge.com)

It is about having a vision, a belief system, an attitude and a worldview that is shared by the entire company. More than a simple guideline, it is a set of values. When a company has a strong culture, everyone in that organization not only supports decisions made by the CEO – but could have made the same decision in his or her place. In our digitalised, open-sourced society the culture is the brand. You cannot fake it.

Some of our clients have the strongest cultures of all. I have to mention Apple, because it’s such a great example. Thanks to the vision of Steve Jobs, Apple has a culture of creativity and innovation. ‘Think different’ was far more than an advertising slogan. It went to the heart of a way of thinking that has transformed the company. By thinking different, Apple shrugged off the notion that it was a mere computer maker and embraced the idea that it was a provider of tools for creative people. The result, of course, was iTunes, the iPod – and later the iPhone. These were radical new departures for Apple, but they were perfectly in tune with its culture.

Apple is well known for the loyalty it engenders among consumers. Needless to say, its employees are equally evangelical. When you go to an Apple store, you can tell the staff love working there. Why? Because a strong culture attracts the best employees. And when the economy crumbles, you want those people by your side.

So how do you build a strong company culture? For one thing, it takes time. You can’t just bolt it on. When you start a company, the culture is already taking root. In fact, very often, company cultures are created by strong leaders. The system may stay in place long after that person has left, but usually it can be traced back to a single inspiring figure.

At TBWA our culture is based on Disruption, which is all about questioning conventions in order to find a new path towards a larger share of the future. But when we organise Disruption exercises (we call them ‘Disruption Days’) for our clients, we do not ask them to change their cultures. In fact, we ask them to look deep within their cultures and identify their key points of difference, a vision and belief-system that sets them apart, makes them likeable or creates a campfire. In this way, we can unlock untapped potential. Companies often tell us that they have ‘found themselves’ after going through the Disruption process. It’s a liberating experience for them.

Take Kraft, who we recently invited to attend a Disruption Day when the company was reviewing the strategy for its Tassimo hot beverage maker. We transformed our Berlin office into an apartment, with a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a kid’s room. We staged Tassimo‘s reality. The convention we identified was that every hot beverage system had a similar positioning, which could be summed up as “the moment”. In other words, the machines delivered a single cup of coffee that the recipient then savored – alone. Our insight was that Tassimo was more about sharing. It delivers many different beverages, including tea and hot chocolate, so there’s something for everyone. Everybody gets what they want. It has a campfire appeal, with people gathering around it make their favorite drink. This led directly to the brand message: “Together is better.” Now Tassimo is building a culture of togetherness that will have an impact on many aspects of its behavior.

You can’t tell the world a company stands for one thing if its employees know that, internally, that isn’t the case. Employees have blogs now – or friends with blogs. The corporate world has become transparent. As I mentioned at the start: the culture has become the brand.

That’s why TBWA aspires to being more than an advertising agency. I like to think that through our work we contribute to our clients’ company cultures. That’s why our relationship with them usually remains strong for so many years: we have played a role in the creation of their culture and our very own. In that way, we help to provide them and ourselves with a sustainable future.

By Ulrich Proeschel, Brand Director TBWA Europe and mad-blog.com initiator.

If you have an questions or suggestions, simply send me an eMail.

“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.”

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.”

(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.

Check out reviews of the book on adage.com and mad-blog.com.

More background, click here.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

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.

Or enjoy all “Get a Mac” commercials on apple.com. Enjoy and remember, get one.