Celebrating 50 years of TBWA(4): When Creative means Disruptive.
The 50th anniversary of TBWA, celebrated this month, is an opportunity to look back on half a century of advertising around the world. After the first chapter (1970-1983) devoted to the birth of TBWA under the sign of multiculturalism (click here), the second chapter (1984) placed under the sign of the anti-conformism of the Chiat Day and Hunt Lascaris agencies were to join the TBWA adventure, and the third chapter (1984-1998) devoted to the history of BDDP which was to merge with TBWA in 1998, here is the fourth chapter dedicated to the rebirth of Disruption, and its effects on major world brands : Apple, Playstation, Adidas, Pedigree, Gatorade between 1998 and 2010.
‘Think different’. This is of course the Apple slogan proposed by Lee Clow's teams to Steve Jobs when he returned in 1997 to Apple, the moribund company he had created in 1976 and from which he had been ousted in 1985. Chiat Day Los Angeles won an agency competition with this signature and internally produced film, combined with a spectacular poster campaign featuring those who "change the world". But "Think Different" could just as well have been the slogan of the Disruption, a proprietary methodology based on the triptych "Convention-Disruption-Vision". This was released by BDDP in 1984 to promote the notion of a disruption strategy, aimed at maximizing the strategic and executive difference of communication campaigns: It is by attacking a preconceived idea, an established convention, that one can find the strongest creative idea to establish the differentiating vision of a brand. The word Disruption, mainly associated with accidental and negative events, suddenly took on an intentional and positive meaning: one could decide to disrupt, rather than be a victim of disruption (see the wikipedia article ‘creative disruption". )
Disruption in communication is therefore - to maximise its strategic differentiation and executive bias, to maximise its effectiveness. The example of the Playstation console, launched by Sony in 1994 in Japan and in 1995 in the rest of the world, arrived late on the market after the successes of Nintendo and Sega. Playstation became a leader by defending an engaging brand vision: the importance of "fun" in life ("Fun, anyone?") and by deciding to fully display its addictive side, with the four symbolic geometric figures of the controller becoming iconic. The campaign that launched the brand in the United States ("You are not ready") won the 1997 Effie Grand Prix for its effectiveness, and a few years later, the film featuring the irresistible appeal of Andy Wharhol's "15 minutes of fame" won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Lions World Advertising Festival.
The "Impossible is nothing" campaign launched in 2004 with the film of Muhammad Ali fighting his daughter Leila in a virtual ring is another good example of the disruptive approach advocated by TBWA. A campaign with a broader vision than just sport, and part of a pioneering proactive approach to promote women's sports. A strategic disruption served by many other creative expressions of Adidas around the world, up to the creation in Tokyo of a spectacular new sport, the "vertical soccer", a poster that will be featured on TV news around the world. Strategic Disruption ("Impossible is nothing") being served here by a media disruption: "What if the poster became, literally, an event? ?.
Since Disruption is a method from the BDDP agency (see episode 3), it might not have survived the merger between BDDP and TBWA in 1998. The opposite happened for two main reasons. The first being that Lee Clow, the charismatic creative guru of Chiat Day in Los Angeles (see episode 2), had himself always been a promoter of an unconventional advertising approach. He therefore immediately adopted the strategic method devised by Jean-Marie Dru and his teams from BDDP (in particular Natalie Rastoin and Fiona Clancy). The second reason lies in a major strategic contribution from South Africa: the creation by the Hunt Lascaris agency of "Disruption Days". A collaborative approach to strategic disruption invented by the South African agency's Director of Strategic Planning, Marie Jamieson, adopting the methods of "Design Thinking" to enable the co-creation of disruptive strategies with TBWA's client teams. It was on the occasion of a worldwide Disruption Day for Pedigree (the world's leading dog food brand of the Mars Group) that the positioning "We are for dogs" and the campaign "Dog's Rule" were born, which will make the success of the brand for more than a decade. Many of the ideas produced on Disruption Day were then applied: from the presence of a picture of their dog on Pedigree employees' business cards, to the promotional use of adoption programs for abandoned dogs, to the relocation of the head office to Tokyo because dogs were not allowed there!
Disruption is a method designed to unleash creativity, while channeling it through a strong strategic angle. Once the brand platform is established on a radical bias, creative added value can be maximized by the highest level of efficiency. An example is the "Replay" campaign for the energy drink brand GATORADE (which was to win two Grand Prix, Promo and PR, at the 2010 Cannes Lions). Like any good Disruption, it can be summed up by a sentence starting with "What if ...": "What if you could replay the most important match of your life? ?. Based on an epic 1993 student soccer game that ended in a draw, the brand offered the players of the time the opportunity to participate 16 years later in a repeat of the same game to determine the winner, filming the teams' preparation until D-Day, thus demonstrating that Gatorade is indeed the energy drink for athletes of all ages.
Apple, Playstation, Adidas, Pedigree, are some examples of Disruption among many others (Nissan, McDonald's, Absolut Vodka, Pepsi, Amnesty International...) that you can find in the book "Disruption Stories", published in 2005. It was in the 2010's that the word "Disruption" had become a "buzzword" used more and more worldwide to qualify the effects of digitalization, of uberization, sometimes used in the traditional sense of the term (negative effect), and sometimes used in the intentional and positive sense advocated by TBWA. This prompted TBWA to persist and sign on by adopting the brand signature "The Disruption Company", thus reaffirming its deep conviction that one should disrupt oneself rather than wait to be disrupted by others. We'll talk more about this next week in Episode 5 of this series devoted to TBWA's 50th anniversary.
