Jean-Marie Dru is the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide He writes a memo to all his colleagues at TBWA every week. Sometimes, he shares them with us:
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.
Jean-Marie Dru is the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide He writes a memo to all his colleagues at TBWA every week. Sometimes, he shares them with us:
We have been talking about branded content for years. And also of brand content. In the first case, the brand participates in pre-existing editorial content, created by others. In the second case, the brand creates its own content.
We have recommended to numerous clients that they play an editorial role, to create content that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. For instance, consider the short Visa Winter Olympics films; or “Replay,” where Gatorade created a re-match between the Easton and Phillipsburg College football teams, 15 years later, with exactly the same players and the same referees. I am also thinking of all those great brand content initiatives from Nissan, Pedigree or Absolut.
The challenge is huge: our competitors are no longer just other brands, but all producers of content, be it TV or press, from journalists to scriptwriters. Our latest productions show that we can meet the challenge.
But often, the question of the legitimacy of brands creating content is raised. There is a preconceived notion that traditional media have more legitimacy than brands as providers of content.
Pascal Somarriba is the former advertising director of Benetton and Color’s magazine, sold for 5.50 euros, with a distribution of 350,000 copies. Here is what he thinks about this “legitimacy issue.”
“People believe that the media are by definition independent. As a consequence, this freedom would guarantee the quality of the content they create. This reasoning is not justified.
In fact, the media are profit-making businesses with commercial constraints that brands don’t have, because brands’ resources come from other activities. The desire to offer different brand experiences leads them to create qualitative content, and pushes them to invest in media projects which are financially inaccessible to traditional media. This is even truer for international companies, able to pay back their content on a worldwide scale.
And on top of it, media must be careful not to upset their reader base, their subscribers in particular, as well as their advertisers (there are numerous cases of advertisers boycotting media following an article or a TV report they didn’t like…).
Brands needn’t be restricted by editorial complexes. It is the level of their editorial ambition that will make the difference. The quality, creativity and innovation of what they do will give brand content the same credibility that the media have gained over time.”
In other words, there is no content that would “naturally” be of quality and for which we could say “in advance” that it is worth being consulted. It always comes back to the audience to judge the quality of the content. As such, brands and media are more and more on the same equal footing.
Last week in during a public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide, covered three critical areas for the future success of brands: (1) big brand ideas, (2) brand content and (3) brand initiatives. Now P&G’s former CMO Jim Stengel rewrites the marketing textbook, as Advertising Age puts it. Stengel is leading a revolution already well under way toward purpose-driven marketing.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Happy Holidays. Mad-blog.com will pause for a couple of days. We have started this blog to celebrate Media Arts and Disruption in February 2009 – after ten month up and running we are very happy about the outcome. But even more important is the fact that all of you are happy with our online publication, the numbers seem to prove this. Our visitors come from 143 countries. Over 6,000 have been visiting mad-blog.com from more than 100 times, I would call them regulars and more than 6,700 have subscribed to our RSS feed. Thanks for all the support. I am looking forward to seeing all of you again next year.
Recently Jean-Marie Dru spoke with the French international news channel, France 24 about our industry.
The communications industry is considered a bellwether for future business and consumer trends, and is also seen as a lead indicator of boom and bust cycles. Raphael Kahane talked the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide about the need for creativity, Disruption and Media Arts.
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.
Last week in during a public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide, covered three critical areas for the future success of brands: (1) big brand ideas, (2) brand content and (3) brand initiatives. Now P&G’s former CMO Jim Stengel rewrites the marketing textbook, as Advertising Age puts it. Stengel is leading a revolution already well under way toward purpose-driven marketing.
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.”
