If anyone deserves their own holiday, it’s dogs. So let’s celebrate our best friends and recognize their contribution to the quality of life on earth. All we have to do is give our own dogs a little extra love, share our stories and pictures on this page and do a little something extra to make the world a better place for dogs.

So if you love dogs the way we love dogs, become a fan, post a picture, tell all your friends and family and download the flyers and stick them up all over.

Learn more about this international holiday for dogs.

And make sure to spread the word. All supporting material is available only one click away.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Jean-Marie Dru (Chairman TBWA Worldwide) will join the TBWA Creative Academy at this year’s Golden Drum Festival. In his speech “DISRUPTION in a disrupted world” he will reflect on one of the toughest periods in the history of the advertising business and offer his thoughts on creativity and how brands should behave in the future.

Bestselling author and the inventor of Disruption – a way of unlocking the hidden potential of brands – Dru is a passionate believer in the power of big ideas. In his speech he will explain why brands now have an even greater need for smart and innovative thinking. And he’ll offer insights into how that thinking has helped mega-brands such as Absolut, Apple, Pedigree and Adidas.

With Disruption, Jean-Marie Dru gave TBWA an idea that has consistently set the agency apart from its competition. Both Advertising Age and Adweek magazines named TBWA Global Agency of the Year in 2008. And Fast Company magazine placed TBWA 24th on its 2009 list of The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.

Disruption is both a mind-set and a methodology that TBWA uses every day to create the ideas that enable its clients to present brands in entirely new ways. It drives success by collaboratively, collectively and systematically interrogating and challenging the conventional thinking.

October 7, 2008; 10:30 a.m., Kodak Hall (Grand Hotel Bernardin, Portoroz SLO)

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

The Guardian reports in its online edition about a great example for Media Arts and Pedigree’s brand behavior. After changing the brand belief from being a dog-food-producer to a dog-loving-company, Pedigree launched the adoption drive initiative in multiple countries. TBWA/London has taken the unusual step of developing a children’s book as a marketing tactic for client Mars UK to promote its Pedigree dog food brand and encourage kids to be dog lovers.

The book, called Oliver’s Travels, tells the story of a dog called Oliver who “lives in a nice, cosy home, then one day everything changes” as The Guardian puts it. The book will sell for £2.99 and all profits will support Pedigree’s adoption drive.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Julie McKeen from TBWA\London.

Dr. Sven H. Becker, CEO of TBWA Germany on why disruption is about so much more than advertising.

What is your personal view of disruption?

Many people outside the agency associate disruption purely with advertising, which is a very one-dimensional way of looking at it. Of course we produce disruptive advertising at TBWA, but that is only one facet of what we do. Disruption is a much broader philosophy that has far bigger implications for brands and their behaviour, not all of which is visible from the outside.

Do you still think of yourself as working in advertising?

I don’t even think I work at an advertising agency! That’s what we were about 25 years ago. Today our job is to help companies take their brands in exciting new directions.

Can you give me some examples?

The classic example is Pedigree, which we transformed from a brand that made dog food into a brand that loves dogs. That insight produced some great creative work – but more importantly it changed the behaviour of the entire company: employees were given permission to bring their dogs into work, and so on. More recently, our work with Nivea has enabled the company to look beyond traditional concepts of beauty. Most beauty brands have a very superficial, external view of beauty. But Nivea presents beauty as a state of mind. Not to forget that both companies outperform their category.

It must be quite a challenge, meeting a company and saying: “We’re going to change the way you think.”

Well, of course we work in partnership with them. We don’t just come up with an idea and force it on them. Disruption is a step-by-step process. We work together to unlock the ideas that were lying dormant within their brands. Disruption is about identifying the self-imposed restrictions that can stifle creativity. We call these restrictions “conventions“. The “disruptive idea“ is one that overturns these conventions and allows a company to adopt a unique standpoint, which we call the “vision“. From that, they discover a new truth about their brand, referred to as the “brand belief“. This is a fundamental statement about the brief and should guide all aspects of communication all “brand behavior“.

Clients find this process liberating – it’s as if they’ve discovered something that they were instinctively aware of all along, but were unable to formulate and put into action. We free those ideas and then polish and shape them.

Not all clients are comfortable with the idea of change.

True, and I would never say that disruption is for everyone. A client that wants to carry on doing the same thing year after year without testing new possibilities – and the increased success that those might bring – is probably not the client for us.

The same goes for clients who don’t want to look beyond conventional advertising?

Classic media – TV, print and radio – still have their place, but they are playing a reduced role within the bigger picture. Audiences now receive messages from many different places, so part of our job is to steer clients towards solutions that they might never have considered before. We refer to as Media Arts.

TBWA still makes traditional ads, though?

Traditional advertising is only one of many Media Arts skills. In the past, advertising was all about interrupting or begging for the audience’s attention. But that’s not what we do at all. Our job is to engage audiences in new and unexpected ways, through a wide variety of media. Actually we consider everything between brand and its audience media, just remember what we did for Labello during the New Years Celebrations earlier this year at Times Square New York and the Berlin Brandburg Gate and how we turned the these parties into the celebrations of kissing.

It’s almost as though you’re saying that brands must be more respectful of audiences.

I feel there’s a new seriousness within the industry. Today’s communications professionals should not be interested in artificial, short-term solutions. They should solve problems for clients in a durable way. That’s why we use disruption to form the brand belief and media arts to change brand behaviour rather than just to inspire witty ads. The end result is ultimately more sophisticated and, inevitably, a richer and more rewarding experience for consumers.

You come from a planning background. What difference does that make now you’re running an agency?

I can’t speak for others, but I believe my job is to take clients degree by degree out of their comfort zone. And as a planner rather than an account man I may find it easier to do that. I’m less concerned with diplomacy. I don’t mind pushing clients towards a path that they might resist a little at first when it’s in the interest of the brand.

And what about the agency employees?

Well, my goal is simply to hold everyone at the agency to account and ensure that we apply the philosophy of disruption to everything we do. That’s not a constraint. Disruption is not a series of rules, but a way of looking at the world differently. Once you accept that, it’s very liberating: anything becomes possible. Disruption gives everybody the chance to make a contribution to our client’s success.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Dr. Sven H. Becker.

AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR There’s no such thing as a captive audience. Gone are the days of neat and discrete moments in time where advertisers talked to target audiences. Today’s is a culture in constant motion. And the dizzying array of platforms, constant connectivity and ever-increasing speed of information has left the ad industry out of sync with its audience. People don’t live in quarterly campaigns, nor do they distinguish communication channels. They expect faster and constant communication with their brands across more media platforms and conversations. Every month, week, day, on the hour. It’s now about how fast brands can move, how relevant they can be and what they can offer in the here and now. There is a always need for “slow” and carefully crafted brand strategies and stories. But, with culture in constant motion there is also a need for marketers to be quick and nimble, so they can find opportunities where their brands can tap into cultural conversations that are part of people’s lives.

BRAND BEHAVIOR Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Digital Officer for TBWA\Worldwide, challenges marketers to “advertise at the speed of culture”— making the case for designing constant communications at the intersections of product, culture, news and events. It’s a fleet of micro-initiatives as ongoing communication programs with your audience in response to culture 365 days a year. It’s about being opportunistic and leveraging key moments with brand relevance. It’s about owning the current conversation to generate faster and more frequent communication points. It’s a new form of CRM using a mix of planned, anticipative and reactive micro initiatives. 

PLANNED initiatives are created around identified cultural moments relevant to your brand. By asking “Who do you think is refreshing music?” Pepsi leveraged the cultural conversation around this year’s Coachella Music Fest with their RefreshMusic Twitter feed featuring Thievery Corporation’s Rob Myers as a guest tweeter. By putting a unique spin on the concert for music lovers, Pepsi is not only letting tweeters experience the festival in new ways, but is also bringing the brand idea “refresh everything” to life.

ANTICIPATED is scenario based planning that requires marketers to be smart enough to see the cultural conversation and be ready to act upon it. Visa’s seemingly “real-time” ad, celebrating Michael Phelps’s Olympic record eight gold medals, proved the brand recognized the Game’s most talked about story. The TV spot had footage of Phelps’s previous wins literally moments after his record-breaking performance, helping Visa go beyond being a sponsor and become a part of the conversation surrounding the Games.

REACTIVE is being nimble enough to surprise and delight your audience by your brand tapping into the zeitgeist. In President Obama’s acceptance speech he declared the family’s intention of getting a dog. The next day, Pedigree began crafting a response. A day later an ad in USA Today urged the President to adopt: “We’d love to help you fulfill your first campaign promise.” Pedigree’s quick actions helped place them in the cultural conversation regarding the President’s pet decision.

Download your Media Arts Monday.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email either Frank Striefler (frank@mediaartslab.com) or Erik Hanson (erik@mediaartslab.com).

Over the years, Pedigree has done an exceptional job of staying true to its brand promise, that everything we do is for the love of dogs. A large part of that promise has been Pedigree’s and TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles’ prevailing Adoption Drive campaign. Now in its fourth year, the Adoption Drive is a multi-million dollar, cause-related awareness and fundraising campaign that rallies dog lovers to help millions of homeless dogs that end up in shelters and breed rescue organizations throughout the world. 

This year, in effort to further raise awareness, Pedigree added the Adoption Drive Foundation, a non-profit organization to benefit select breed rescues and shelters, and the Pedigree DOGSTORE — a pop-up store in Times Square which hosted local New York shelters dogs and gave the public the chance to buy branded merchandise, make charitable donations to the foundation and, of course, adopt dogs. The store was timed to Pedigree’s annual sponsorship of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. 

Every year, Westminster recognizes the top purebreds in the world. What they don’t recognize are the thousands of less fortunate dogs in shelters across America. This seemed like the opportune time to “drive” the campaign into dog lovers’ minds. Did it work? 

The store was only open for a few weeks, but it managed to attract over 43,000 visitors, over 75,000 was spent on merchandise and the store received over 4,500 in straight donations. Spokesperson, Kate Walsh, from ABC’s (American Broadcast Corporation) television show Private Practice, officially opened the store and even adopted a little black Shepard-mix puppy; after which, the two appeared on popular American talk shows such as Rachel Ray, the Tonight Show with David Letterman, Martha and the Today show. The promotion was also featured on a segment of Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice, which had contestants crafting adoption awareness ads.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email Marianne Stefanowicz.

One of the strengths of a disruptive strategy is that it changes not just a company’s advertising, but the company itself. 

The classic example is Pedigree. We convinced Pedigree that it should not regard itself as a dog food company – but a company that loves dogs. 

That vision changed everything: the company’s employees began bringing their dogs to work. The Tokyo branch moved its headquarters to a building where dogs were allowed. And the company got behind pet adoption schemes. It was no longer a company that made products for dogs. It was The Dog Company.

This was change that went far beyond advertising.

And what about Adidas? There was a time when the brand was barely visible. Poor management and a succession of owners had left it floundering, handing Nike a virtual monopoly.

Then came a new vision: “Impossible is nothing.” New product lines and new stylists aided the change, but the vision provided an architecture. CEO Erich Stamminger described it as: “Our legacy, our mission and our challenge.”

 More recently, TBWA proved definitively that it was willing to propose risky changes to its clients. For many years, our strategy for Absolut vodka had been based around the unique – and disruptive – design of the bottle. Print advertising featuring that iconic shape had established the Absolut brand and won accolades all around the world. Some people collected the ads as if they were works of art – which very often they were.

Last year, we abandoned the strategy. With the bottle shape now clearly linked to Absolut in the minds of our consumers, it was time to try something new. So instead of focusing on the bottle or the packaging, we took the radical step of positioning Absolut as a symbol of perfection in an imperfect world.

This was a brave move, but it worked. The headline in Advertising Age read: “Breaking With Bottle Fires Up Absolut Sales.”

Not only that, but the new strategy is spot on for these uncertain times. Change pays off. 

Jean-Marie Dru once wrote that great brands are powerful only if they take action. “Great brands are not nouns but verbs. Apple liberates, IBM solves, Nike exhorts, Virgin challenges, Sony dreams.”

I find myself thinking again of the barman at the Sanderson Hotel in London, with his T-shirt reading RECESS IS ON. Shortly after meeting him, I discovered that the hotel group had set up a website explaining its attitude to the economic downturn (recessison.com). 

The home page was very simple. It said: FUCK THE RECESSION

This alone will not make the crisis go away. But it is a statement of defiance. The next step is to take action. It’s time to change.

Nick Baum is Vice President Europe at TBWA. In this series of four posts, he explains why CHANGE is the right way to tackle the recession. If you have any comments or suggestions please email Nick Baum.

Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change.” There is only one strategy riskier than change right now – and that is retrenchment. As we’ve seen time and time again, companies that cut costs or simply stand still during a recession emerge far weaker than their more courageous competitors.

Of course, every recession is different. The marketing book on how to behave today has not been written. This is possibly the worst financial crisis in history, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better. Nor is advertising a global panacea. But a strong advertising strategy can provoke much-needed change.

That’s where disruption comes in. As the inventors of disruption, we are the owners of a methodology for change.

The three most important words to a company during a recession are TRUST – the trust of your consumers – TRUTH – the transparency that will enable you to retain that trust – and INNOVATION.

Look at this list of the top five most innovative companies in 2008, published by Fast Company magazine.

Read more…