Adland

  A crucial moment came in the mid-1980s, when TBWA and Roux managed to enlist Andy Warhol to design an ad for the brand. (Although the artist didn’t drink the stuff, he occasionally liked to dab it on as cologne.) After Warhol’s contribution came designs from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Anointed by Manhattan’s counter-culture, Absolut vodka became, in Bonnange’s words, ‘the snobbiest drink in the United States’. In the decade up to 1989, shipments of Absolut rose from under 100,000 litres to almost 30 million, and it sped past Russian brands to grab the biggest slice of the imported vodka market. At the same time, the campaign confirmed TBWA’s reputation as one of the world’s most creative advertising organizations.

  The seeds of disruption

  TBWA’s success brought it to the attention of the US communications conglomerate Omnicom, now owner of the DDB and BBDO networks. Omnicom realized that TBWA was about to hit a wall: if it wanted to move into Asia and Latin America, as well as strengthening its presence in the United States, it was going to need additional funding. Omnicom made TBWA an offer it would have been foolish to refuse. In 1990, not without irony, the first European advertising network became the third pillar of an American conglomerate. And in 1995, Omnicom chose TBWA as the perfect home for its newly acquired West Coast agency, Chiat/Day.

  The merger provoked high drama in London, where Chiat/Day’s UK office decided that it had no intention of becoming part of TBWA. Andy Law, who headed the office, was convinced that a merger with TBWA would mean ‘spiritual death’ for the agency. ‘I knew we’d all end up in the basement of TBWA,’ he said at the time (‘The ad agency to end all ad agencies’, Fast Company, December 1996).

  Returning from a tense meeting with Omnicom, Law drew a line across the floor of his office. ‘I’m leaving,’ he told his staff, tacitly suggesting that those who wanted to follow him should cross the line. One by one, they did so. Omnicom was left with little choice but to sell the London office of Chiat/Day to Law and his associates. The breakaway was named St Luke’s – after the patron saint of artists or, pushing it a bit, ‘creative people’. It became one of the most high-profile hot shops of the 1990s, generating reams of press coverage with its desk-free offices and its cooperative structure – in which every member of staff was given an equal stake in the agency. It seemed almost too trendy for its own good. Law has since left St Luke’s, which lost some of its initial verve. But as one of a group of feral agencies that gnawed at the wainscoting of an increasingly monolithic nineties advertising business, it was undoubtedly influential. (See Chapter 13, The Alternatives.)

  Meanwhile, TBWA had another merger to digest. One of the star French agencies of the 1980s was BDDP, founded in 1984 by Jean-Claude Boulet, Jean-Marie Dru, Marie-Catherine Dupuy and Jean-Pierre Petit. (For fans of the minutiae of advertising history, Marie-Catherine Dupuy’s grandfather, Roger-Louis Dupuy, founded one of the first agencies in France in 1926. Later, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Marie-Catherine’s father, ran the agency, which in time became Dupuy-Compton.)

  The last time we met BDDP on our tour of adland, it had failed to snap up London’s BMP (which was bought instead by DDB), but successfully acquired New York’s Wells Rich Greene for the colossal sum of US $160 million. Initially this didn’t hurt BDDP, as its billings were close to US $930 million. But when the dank fog of recession closed in, the agency began to lose its way. Arguably, as often happens in the advertising business, Wells Rich Greene’s oldest clients felt destabilized by the departure of agency figurehead Mary Wells. In her book, Wells writes that she was ‘too familiar with the fates of former chairmen and I assumed [BDDP] had their own ideas about how to run the agency’. She suggests that the agency ‘was not the reign of Mary, it was a history of groundbreaking television advertising created by pioneering thinkers with tremendous talent’.

  Nevertheless, clients began to leave. Some of these losses were provoked by the recession: Continental Airlines filed for Chapter 11, and the newly-named Wells BDDP was forced to cover the unpaid media bills. IBM subtracted a chunk of business when it consolidated its global account with Ogilvy. Slowly, the billings began to trickle away. In a surprising move, the British agency GGT acquired a weakened Wells BDDP for US $174 million in 1997. But the apparent culture clash between these three different elements – Wells, BDDP and GGT – further destabilized the agency. Now Procter & Gamble pulled out its US $125 million account. BDDP was a shadow of its former self.

  Once again, Omnicom saw its chance and swooped. It paid US $230 million for GGT BDDP in 1998. The acquisition was fused with the TBWA network. Gradually, even in its French homeland, the name BDDP vanished into the annals of history. But a reminder of its glory days lives on in the form of BDDP & Fils, a creative spin-off, founded in 1998, that continues to be highly respected in the French market.

  The worldwide chairman of TBWA is Jean-Marie Dru, one of the original founders of BDDP. Tall, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, Dru has the look of an energetic professor who may be a bit handy on the rugby field. He is the architect of the network’s USP of ‘disruption’. This is a marketing technique designed to force a brand out of its comfort zone. It’s about challenging – or even overturning – the status quo. Quite simply, it’s about breaking the rules. ‘Brands that don’t innovate begin to deteriorate,’ Dru explains. ‘Our job is to help them change.’

  Dru says that the roots of Disruption date back to the earliest days of BDDP. ‘As a new, challenger agency, we realized that we had to offer something more than the mere promise of “creativity” to differentiate ourselves. For a start we decided to take on “problem brands”. Our approach was, “give us your brand if it’s in trouble, and we’ll turn it around”… We arrived at the idea of reinvention as a “rupture” with the past – a word that works much better in French than in English. As our international network grew, the idea evolved into “disruption”, which can still sound negative in the wrong context, but is slightly less shocking in English.’

  As BDDP grew larger and Dru became more preoccupied, he had less time to spread the gospel about Disruption. For a while, the idea went into hibernation. After the fusion with TBWA, Dru assumed that Disruption was dead, ‘because it’s very difficult to impose the culture of one agency on another; especially when you’re the one who’s just been bought’. But the theory resurfaced when Dru teamed up with John Hunt, of TBWA’s highly creative South African office (see Chapter 16, International outposts), to create one of the first Disruption Days. These are brainstorming sessions during which clients are challenged to dissect their brand values and identify those that signify outmoded or conventional thinking; and which could be successfully ‘disrupted’. ‘The great advantage of these sessions is that, even when they don’t generate a great new idea, they make the client more receptive to innovation. In the future they’ll be more open to genuinely creative ideas – ideas that, for them, represent real change.’

  Further Disruption Days were held around the world, and gradually the philosophy entered the bloodstream of the agency. Dru accepts that Disruption is a simple idea, based on the truism that change can ensure relevance – but the skill lies in its execution. ‘When you’ve identified the elements of a brand that could be subject to change, which one do you choose? Change takes time, and when you embark on a long-term strategy you need to be fixed on a goal. Is the key value of our new positioning going to be “health”, or is it going to be “taste”? Clearly, it’s vital to make the right choice at the outset.’

  Apple is a classic example of the Disruption process at work. In 1997, the company was in trouble. Following the departure of its co-founder, Steve Jobs, in 1985, it had changed chief executives more times than it had changed advertising agencies. It was haemorrhaging cash, losing up to US $1 billion a year. In addition, the brand had lost its sense of identity. With Chiat/Day’s ‘1984’ commercial, the computer maker had positioned itself as a tool that liberated man from machine. It was the unconventional yet human face of computing. But ho
me PCs were now commonplace: computers were no longer the focus of wariness or anxiety on the part of consumers.

  When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and resumed contact with his old agency – now in the form of TBWA – a new approach was required. Apple ransacked one of its old brand values and repositioned itself as the tool of predilection for creative thinkers. The resulting campaign was entitled ‘Think Different’. It paved the way for the launch of the iMac, Apple’s turnaround product. And the ‘disruptive’ insight that Apple was about creative utility rather than computer screens led ultimately to the development of the iPod.

  Disruption is still a central pillar of TBWA’s offering, supported by what it calls ‘Media Arts’. The business of achieving visibility in media was once largely a matter of spend – with some strategic planning bolted on – but in today’s multi-platform media world, breaking through the cacophony requires more finesse. Media Arts sums up this idea. It essentially urges advertising people to go beyond selling – and even beyond the basic idea of providing entertainment. The goal is to create an event; a highly memorable experience.

  One classic example is TBWA’s work for energy drink Gatorade in 2009. The agency reunited two rival US college football teams 15 years after a frustrating (and famous) 7–7 tie. The original players, the original coaches, even the original cheerleaders returned for a re-match that was breathlessly followed by traditional and online media. The match itself was played on 26 April before 15,000 spectators (the Phillipsburg Stateliners beat the Easton Red Rovers 27-12).

  Not only was this crowd-pleasing event cooked up by an ad agency, it also provoked massive (and free) media coverage, as well as a spin-off TV series. Disruption and Media Arts, flexing their muscles. Traditional advertising forms were beginning to look distinctly creaky.

  09

  European icons

  ‘The product is the same – the difference is the communications’

  Every Christmas, without fail, a parcel the size and shape of a hatbox appears on my doorstep. Inside, entirely made of chocolate, are the intertwined letters A and T. It’s the logo of Armando Testa, Italy’s leading creative agency, in candy form. The parcel is a souvenir of the first visit I made to the agency no fewer than seven years ago. I’ve been back a few times since – but if I had never darkened Testa’s door again, I doubt it would have made much difference. All cynicism aside, this seems a little warmer than the average PR gesture. I wrote a positive article once, so I’ve been adopted.

  Maybe the fact that we’re in Italy encourages metaphors concerning the family. And Testa is all about family. Armando Testa, a Turin-based graphic designer, founded the agency in 1946. He died in 1992, but by then the agency had been taken to even greater heights by his son, Marco, who took over as managing director in 1985. The agency remains stubbornly independent, refusing to be snapped up by an American leviathan.

  Contributing to the familial atmosphere is the fact that, to a certain extent, Testa is the Italian Leo Burnett. The agency handles household names like Pirelli, Lavazza, San Pellegrino and Fiat-Lancia. And it has created much-loved characters like Pippo, a friendly blue hippopotamus, for a brand of diapers, and the immortal Caballero and Carmencita, two cone-shaped cartoon characters brought to life for Café Paulista in the 1960s and still going strong.

  But there is another, hipper side to Armando Testa. It has a strong graphic design heritage and its print work, particularly, has an undeniable punch. Consider the groovy posters it creates every year for Lavazza coffee: ultra-glam confections shot by photographers such as David LaChapelle, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Ellen Von Unwerth. Outdoor advertising is often dismissed as visual pollution – but these babies actually brighten up a cityscape. The spin-off calendars wrench a vivid hole in your wall. Armando Testa would have approved, as his greatest goal in life was to make an impact.

  The graphic world of Armando Testa

  Armando Testa has something in common with the French affichistes Cassandre and Raymond Savignac. Unlike those masters of poster art, however, Testa managed to translate his talent into a full-service advertising agency that remains a force in Italy to this day.

  He was born in Turin in 1917 and – like most of his generation who came from a humble background – he attended the school of life. By the age of 14 he had already been apprenticed to a locksmith, a sheet metal worker and a typesetter. The latter seems to have awoken his artistic impulses, because he began attending night classes at the Vigliardi Paravia School of Graphic Arts. Here he met Ezio d’Errico, a teacher at the school and one of the best-known abstract artists of the day, who became his mentor. Under d’Errico’s influence, Testa began winning competitions to design letterheads and leaflets.

  But Testa was a perfectionist: he worked slowly and had, at that stage, an over-inflated opinion of himself, which combined to make him a difficult employee. Each printing company he joined fired him a few weeks later – until at the age of 18 he had been let go by 28 different employers.

  In 1937 he won a competition to design a poster for ICI (Industria Colori Inchiostri SA), a Milanese company that made coloured inks for the printing industry. The brutally simple design – which resembles the letters ICI in origami form on a black background – indicated Testa’s future direction. In a catalogue of his work produced for an exhibition at the Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1987, he commented: ‘My love of synthesis – conveying a message by means of a single gesture, a simple image – and my use of white backgrounds, primary colours and the most basic symbols of visual communication (circle, cross, diagonal, angle) have unfortunately endowed me over the years with a distinctive style, and many people recognize my work on sight.’

  After the war – which he spent as an aerial photographer – Testa opened a graphic design studio in Turin. He attracted commissions from the likes of Pirelli and (hat maker) Borsalino. Throughout his early career, he wrestled with the conflict between his desire to create abstract art and his interest in producing commercial imagery. Fortunately, he was able to work with clients who, like him, felt that art and commerce were not mutually exclusive.

  Maurizio Sala, president of the Italian Art Directors’ Club and vice president of Armando Testa Group, still becomes animated when he talks about Armando: ‘Advertising today just refers to other advertising. But Armando made advertising that referred to art, to books, to cinema. He had a very wide frame of reference.’

  As for the man himself, Sala remains knocked out by him. ‘When he entered a room it was like being hit by an ocean wave – he was extraordinarily energetic. And because of this charisma he could always get what he wanted. He was very good at seducing clients. He would sit down, draw his chair up close to them and ask, “So how much money have you got?” ’

  Testa needed his charm because his creative work was often provocative. Sala says, ‘He felt that great advertising should make the viewer a little uncomfortable. If it was designed to please everyone, it wouldn’t get noticed; it would just sink into the sea of banality that surrounded it.’

  In 1956, Testa created a full-service advertising agency with his first wife Lidia and her brother Francesco de Barberis, a marketing expert. A year later, commercial television began in Italy. Sala says, ‘Many advertising companies went out of business because they didn’t know how to do television ads, while clients were shifting large chunks of their budgets to the new medium. Instead of being defeated, Armando set up his own production company to experiment with stop motion animation techniques. He was very inspired by Eastern European animation. The characters he created mirrored his poster work – very simple and graphic, like the blue hippo or the Paulista coffee characters, which are simple cones with eyes, mouths and hats.’

  The success of Testa’s TV work was initially due to a quirk of Italian legislation that resulted in Carosello, a 10-minute daily ad break screened every evening at around 8.50 from February 1957 to the end of 1976. The slot forced agencies to create advertising that resembled TV conten
t: series of cartoons and comedy sketches, which had to be entertaining and/or educational. The sell was so soft it was positively downy. At its peak it was the most popular TV show in Italy, boasting an audience of 20 million (half of them children). Sala explains: ‘This was a period when well-known directors and actors were making advertising. Audiences adored Carosello. Parents would say to their kids, “You can watch Carosello and then it’s time for bed.” That’s why Armando was able to develop such memorable characters for brands.’

  Although the legacy of Carosello is occasionally blamed for Italian TV advertising’s comparative lack of bite today, it had the kind of following that agencies can now only dream about, and it transformed brands into popular culture icons. Meanwhile, Armando Testa had achieved considerable celebrity, dating back to 1959 when he was commissioned to design the official logo for the Rome Olympics. By the 1970s the agency had swelled in size and opened regional offices in Milan and Rome.

  Testa’s son, Marco, came on board in the early 1980s. At first Marco had been reluctant to join the family firm, and his desire for independence was sometimes a source of strain. When he returned to Italy from Benton & Bowles in New York – where he had gone to develop a more international approach to advertising – he set up his own agency called, pointedly, L’Altra (‘The Other’). ‘We lost our biggest client in the first six months, and spent the next six months trying to get the money back from 20 small clients,’ he recalls, with a grim smile. Eventually, however, he was reconciled with his father. ‘He asked me, “Do you want to start where I am now, or do you want to spend your whole life getting here?” I realized he had a point.’

  But Marco Testa retains his independent streak, which is perhaps why he hasn’t sold out to a conglomerate. He puts it in more strategic terms: ‘If the industry is divided between giant groups and small creative hot shops, where are the big clients who are not global mammoths supposed to go?’