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.

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 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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

1.   Google

2.   Apple

3.   Facebook

4.   GE

5.   Ideo

Wait a minute – did they say GE? What’s General Electric doing at number four?

In fact, GE has been at the cutting edge of innovation for 125 years. As Fast Company explains, from hybrid locomotives that reduce emission output by as much as 50%, to HD CT Scanners that are 100 times faster yet cut radiation exposure by half, GE consistently delivers on its promise to “bring good things to life.”

It’s no coincidence that one of the admirers of GE is Vijay Govindarajan, a professor of international business and an innovation guru. He said: “People believe that it is only small companies that can… innovate. I believe that it is the role of large companies like GE to solve big, complex problems that will make a huge difference to humanity.”

Soon I’ll be looking at some other companies who’ve put innovation first. Their names are familiar to you: they are the likes of Apple, Adidas, Absolut and Pedigree.

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.

Britain’s great marketing effectiveness stories of the 1990s were Orange’s ‘The Future’s Bright’ and Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’.  They didn’t rely on product USPs or lovable gag-filled campaigns. Instead they made big statements about their brands’ positions in the world. David Brooks caught the mood in Bobos In Paradise, describing an era in which ice cream companies possessed their own foreign policies.   

But while this heroic style of marketing went on to great heights, along came a bunch of branding success stories that challenged the big idea approach.

Innocent Smoothies became a £70million business without having its own election manifesto.  Nike revitalized its brand through a series of 10K runs, instead of bringing ‘Just Do It’ out of retirement.   Virgin Mobile picked up more customers than any other network by acting fun and irreverent, rather than lecturing people about the future of human interaction.  These brands weren’t concerned with communicating their agenda.  They were more concerned with connecting with people.  They connected through stuff they did, not through claims they made.  And they chimed with an increasingly interactive culture where people expected conversations instead of lectures from brands.  No wonder that some of the most interesting writers on brand culture – notably John Grant and Russell Davies – were dismissive of Big Idea marketing. 

All of which could make Big Ideas feel rather dated: a lumbering approach to a nimble world.

Yet we still need Big Ideas.  They remain useful to so many of the constituencies of marketing.  Looking at where and why they are useful gives us clues as to how big ideas can be as relevant in today’s new media as they were in their 90s heyday.

The argument that brands and consumers need big ideas is well-trodden.  Brands need them in order to stand out from the competition, and to glue together their marketing efforts.  Consumers need Big Ideas to catch their interest and to guide their choices.  This isn’t a sinister suggestion, just an honest admission that people are more likely to warm to interesting brands than to weigh up every consumer choice like a chess computer. 

Marketing businesses need them too. Working on a brand that doesn’t have a Big Idea can be like sailing without a compass.  You have no idea or control over where you’re going. You start from zero on every project.    You have to sell ideas to brand owners who may have nothing more to guide them than their own imperfect instinct.

Big Ideas lift the potential chaos of working with brands up to higher ground.  If you’ve agreed that the brand is going to take a particular position, you start projects from a more interesting place.  Want to get skydivers to perform an ad live on air for Honda?  Fine.  Because we agreed the brand believes in Difficult Is Worth Doing.  They help marketing businesses retain their clients.  You’d think twice before tinning the authors of your success.  And they grow business.  It’s easier for the custodians of the big idea to pick up another assignment from a brand owner because, well, they’re the custodians of the big idea.  Procter & Gamble recently offered to hand over entire marketing budgets to agencies of any discipline if they could demonstrate an understanding of a brand’s Big Idea and had a point of view about how to divvy the budget across different channels.  P&G are both Cannes’ Advertiser of the Year and are the world’s biggest advertiser.  Now there’s an incentive.

Most importantly, brand owners need big ideas.  Not just to hold their campaigns together, but to hold their businesses together.

The biggest big idea in businesses is the strategy: how the business organizes its efforts to create value, where it over-delivers, what it sacrifices. As businesses become more sprawling, running them becomes more about steering through complexity.   Here the big idea plays a profound role:  it’s the strategy articulated in a catchy form.  

Wait for the blue bubbles to disperse and 02′s ‘See What You Can Do’ idea emerges as a statement that 02 will put useful innovations in the hands of its customers. ‘Like No Other’ reinforces Sony’s price premium at a time when every electronics brand offers reasonable quality.  The big idea helps the public to find value in the same place where the business is creating value.  

A big idea is magnetic north for businesses.  It sets a direction for what they should and shouldn’t do.  Long before the idea reaches the public, it should be galvanizing the people within the business.  

Pedigree Manifesto Ad (US)

Pedigree Petfoods used a big idea to redirect its business.  The brand had moved sideways for years as Pedigree came to think of itself as a meat processing business rather than as a dog business.  Then Pedigree realized that its true source of value was empathy: prove you love my dog and I’ll let you feed it.  Their big idea was ‘We’re For Dogs’.  It influenced the organization as much as the public.  Pedigree began running dog adoption schemes, staff put pictures of their dogs on business cards, reps took their dogs on sales visits, it even moved out of a Tokyo office that had a No Pets policy.  No wonder company president Paul Michaels called it a compass for the organization.

So that’s a yes from consumers, brands, marketing businesses and brand owners.  But does media need big ideas?  I’m not so sure.

Ad space is a great place to create images and tell people ideas.  Media itself doesn’t suit Big Ideas. 

Media connects with people through content, not through positionings.  You get a much better idea of what a media brand Channel 4 is like from the programmes it screens and the idents it makes than you would from an abstract Big Idea about provocation or freshness.  It’s instructive that Channel 4 and Google don’t have strap lines, and amusing that the most famous attempt at Big Idea marketing in television, ‘Fox News: Fair And Balanced’, is balls.

And new media is a less fertile soil for classic Big Idea marketing. Big Ideas have tended to be one-way transmissions – here’s what we believe in – which work less well in media where people expect to explore and enquire.  I might be happy to watch an Orange commercial, but why should I bother to find out why the future’s bright?   A brand that goes online to repeatedly shout its endline will sound like a pub bore.  And what if the urge to explore and enquire leads me to look behind your big idea?  It could turn out to be hollow, if it’s no more than an image, or it could turn out to be inauthentic, if the everyday actions of the brand don’t follow the fine sentiment of its Big Idea.  Dove introduced the idea of Real Beauty through press and TV, but got caught retouching its models via the Internet. 

In Part Two the author will propose five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape. Check with us again tomorrow.

Continue reading…

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Tom Morton, Executive Planning Director at TBWA\ London (tom.morton@tbwa-london.com).

Campaign launch: Muhammad Ali

We launched “Impossible is Nothing” on the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Avenue in New York. I remember it well, because I was there at the time. I was surprised to see that kids still perceived Mohammad Ali as a star. Of course, he has a big personality – which enabled him to become a legend.  

Rather than just being a slogan, “Impossible in Nothing” is actually an affirmation that you’re ready for anything. Big ideas have another advantage: a strong brand idea can inspire a lot of executions. 

For example, we constructed a giant “Oliver Kahn Bridge” – an enormous image of the German goalkeeper – over the road near Munich airport. And the Cologne train station ceiling was painted with a celestial soccer match in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Athletes impress us by succeeding against the odds. This is the “Impossible is Nothing” spirit. The manifesto is very simple. It says that “impossible” is not a fact, but an opinion. 

We also launched a manifesto for Pedigree (as well as a book called Dogma). People love their pets so much that they’re often featured in family photographs. Who better than Pedigree, the biggest pet food brand in the world, to celebrate the affection that people have for their dogs? 

So Pedigree adopted an ambitious stance: “Everything Pedigree does is done for the love of dogs.” That changed a lot – not only in the brand’s positioning, but also in its behavior. For instance, Pedigree employees were now invited to bring their pets to work. Salespeople could visit their clients with their dogs. The company even changed its Tokyo offices because dogs were not allowed in the building. It would be hard to find a stronger example of commitment to a brand idea. As Paul Michaels said, Pedigree went from being a “dog food company” to a “dog company”. 

To “Impossible is Nothing” for Adidas and “Dogs Rule” for Pedigree I could add “Shift” for Nissan and “Think Different” for Apple. All these ideas are “big”. They’re big because they have an internal as well as an external effect, and because they work across media, from a billboard to a TV screen to a CEO’s speech. 

So what about a brand like Apple? For me, Apple is an example of a company that has grown big, while staying in touch with its small side. It combines the innovation of small with the energy of big. 

In the 1960s Bill Bernbach taught us that, in the words of his legendary ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, “Small is beautiful”. But Cadillac ran a much older ad, in 1915, called “The penalty of leadership”. It suggested that when you are at the top, everyone wants to knock you off. So you have to try harder. The result: big becomes beautiful. 

I talked about P&G at the beginning. Not only because it was named Advertiser of the Year – but also because it stands as genuine proof that big can be creative.

Click here to read Part One.