Co-founder and founding editor of Fast Company magazine, Bill Taylor is the author of a new book about disruptive businesses. He took time out from a tour of TBWA offices to talk to us.
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.
TBWA’s top creative says brands must resonate emotionally across media or face the consequences.
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.”
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.
The Recording Academy® unveiled an innovative advertising campaign for the 52nd Annual GRAMMY® Awards, airing live on CBS Jan. 31. The fully integrated campaign, titled “We’re All Fans,” highlights music fans’ unprecedented impact in the current digital age.
The heart of the campaign is the Web site, www.wereallfans.com — a first-of-its-kind interactive fan experience — featuring portraits of GRAMMY-nominated artists composed entirely of real-time, fan-generated YouTube, Twitter and Flickr postings. This user-submitted content is continuously gathered from these social media platforms and refreshed on the campaign site to form a constantly evolving, “living” portrait of each artist. TV, print, out-of-home and interactive all support and will drive traffic to www.wereallfans.com.
“Music connects us all and while it comes to life in the hands of artists, it lives and breathes in the hearts and minds of fans,” said Evan Greene, Chief Marketing Officer of The Recording Academy. “With the natural evolution of social media, fans have become a cultural force driving the power of music, and this year’s ad campaign celebrates the connection between fans and some of today’s most relevant artists.”
“Fans have always been the driving force of music, but with the rise of social media they are now more powerful, more connected and more influential than ever,” said Patrick O’Neill, Executive Creative Director at TBWA\Chiat\Day\Los Angeles. “We wanted to tap into what music fans are already doing: sharing, tweeting, singing about their favorite song/musician/lyric every second, every day, all over the Web. The ‘We’re All Fans’ GRAMMY Awards campaign harnesses this enthusiasm and puts the fans at the center of the idea. And we all know, music is nothing without the fans.”
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email Marianne Stefanowicz.
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.
One of the most successful commercials, Heineken’s “Walk-In Fridge” was aired the first time in January 2009. It has been spoofed several times, shared by millions of fans around the world and now TBWA\Neboko in Amsterdam has added another chapter to the story.
After seeing the commercial, basically all male beer fans where looking for a way to get their own “Walk-In Fridge”. Some where succeeded, at least looked it that way. In December 2009 pedestrians across Amsterdam saw giant carton boxes, at recycling stations, on central places and being carried by a group of young beer-thrusty men. A fun an entertaining way to recalling a great idea.
Get a Heineken and enjoy some great brand behavior.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email Jeroen Konings.
After seeing the commercial, basically all male beer fans where looking for a way to get their own “Walk-In Fridge”. Some where succeeded, at least looked it that way. In December 2009 pedestrians across Amsterdam saw giant carton boxes, at recycling stations, on central places and being carried by a group of young beer-thrusty men. A fun an entertaining way to recalling a great idea.
