by Anna Gamboa
CANNES – TBWA Global Chief Strategy Officer Nick Barham said “Disruption is all about challenging the status quo and encouraging companies, brands, and products to behave in new and unexpected ways.”
TBWA Worldwide CEO Jean-Marie Dru reflects that disruption’s meaning changes everyday and it seems it has become the norm. This disturbed TBWA because disruption is at the core of everything they do. It is even a registered trademark in 50 countries. Disruption can be so commonplace, should it still be used? Is it a tired word? He goes on to talk about the three-step process of convention-disruption-vision, of how Gatorade changed how athletes saw their performance from equipment/external based perception to an inner/ability view. AirBNB was a way to make the world smaller. A bank, instead of being just a financial institution, was re-envisioned as a public service.
Battling negativity, talking about dramatic issues, TBWA’s clients were uncomfortable and skeptical at first when the concept was introduced in the 1980’s. “Disruption” was also perceived as a clumsy word, compared to “strategie de rupture”. The agency then offered to turn around ailing brands with daring, risky strategies. TBWA also took out ads in three international newspapers, including Le Figaro and The Wall Street Journal, explaining what disruption was. “Too many words,” Dru comments dryly about that ad, but goes on to point out that after that the methodology started to take off—and they even published a book titled Disruption—the first-ever business book that featured the word in the title.
But with the publication of The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama—which discussed the shift from the industrial age to the information age—TBWA’s meaning of “disruption” became diluted as other users came to use the word in different ways, registered trademark notwithstanding. Other books started using the word in their titles, especially in the digital age. And so the agency decided to relaunch Disruption®, but still retaining their original definition, in Dru’s words: “to put Disruption at the heart of the agency, everyday!”
And so the agency embarked in exercises, workshops and proprietary digital platforms to come up with innovative ideas on an everyday basis. With that, they could even help clients innovate on their own innovations. “You can come up with a disruptive product, you can come up with a disruptive business model, you can come up with disruptive marketing strategy, you can come up with a disruptive communication plan,” Dru enumerates. It’s a way of thinking that isn’t linear or incremental, and always creative—which allow for strategic leaps. At its core, Disruption is meant to be a springboard for creative change inside the workplace, taking positive effect in the market or consumer—allowing for the creation and growing of global brands.
Ilkay Gurpinar, Chief Creative Officer of TBWA\Istanbul, underscores the importance of being connected to the client to understand their needs, establishing good working relationships—to the point of sheepishly admiting that she became such good friends with one client she became a bridesmaid at her client/friend’s wedding. In other cases, it forged fortuitous partnerships, as in the case of online and print news outlet Radikal, which demonstrated to online readers “the fading news” which showed the detrimental effects of a law that might have been passed by the Turkish government allowing those in authority to erase anything on the Internet within four hours. Within an hour, the campaign became viral on the internet and became a hot topic for discussion. With no media budget, they reached over 32 million people and had over 104 million impressions—and the Turkish law was revised, requiring a court order for anything to be erased from the internet.
In the words of TBWA’s Lee Clow: “Disruption is the active interpretation of the brand vision. It may have started as a noun, as a way of thinking, but it has become a verb. A thing we do. Every day.”
