Beyond Disruption
By Jean-Marie Dru
304 pp. New York: Wiley. $29.95.
There's an old saw in the marketing business: "Companies get the advertising they deserve." Lethargic, bureaucracy-ridden conglomerates often spew out dull, uninspired advertising. And why not? Marketing ideas that are ground through committee after committee come out devoid of any creative juice, unsurprisingly. Nobody ever got fired for staying the course.
Acutely aware of this myopia, Jean-Marie Dru and his colleagues at mega-agency TBWA have teamed up to break that vicious cycle. Businesses and advertising agencies must work together, Dru argues, to push the marketing envelope. In a word, there must be disruption.
Fundamentally, Dru is, of course, quite right. The weight of insipid advertising, even in this distressed economy, is often unbearable. All that cheap dot-com money sloshing around seems to have done nothing but drive up prices and wear down creativity. One longs for the Ogilvy days of simple, elegant advertising.
Without giving away too much, Dru defines disruption as a three-step process: Convention, Disruption and Vision. "You start by identifying the Conventions that restrict the thought process, and then you challenge them through a Disruption, a radically new and unexpected idea," he writes. "This is all done with a very definite sense of Vision - of where you are going, of the ground you want to cover from today to tomorrow." Got it? Like all great ideas, it's deceptively simple.
The unsung heroes in Beyond Disruption are the clients themselves. Anyone who has spent time in the advertising maelstrom knows even the greatest creative ideas can die when confronted with corporate inertia. It's a little easier to pitch edgy campaigns when you're working with a company that's teetering on oblivion (Apple); entering a crowded market as an unknown (Absolut); or run by the poster child for iconoclasm (Virgin).
At the risk of bursting Dru's bubble, the concept of disruption is not necessarily new. Although the book takes great pains to distance itself from such hackneyed phrases as "breaking through the clutter," that is, at its heart, what disruption appears to be about. To be fair, Dru has taken his notion to an extremely refined intellectual degree and no one would dare confuse disruption with mere boosterism from a perky creative team.
Operating in Dru's favor is the simple fact TBWA has created some of the most memorable advertising of our time. From the "Think Different" campaign for Apple to the immortal print ads for Absolut vodka, Dru's agency has made deep impressions on the collective consumer consciousness. Needless to say, those case studies (along with a slew of other lesser known efforts) are presented and analyzed in great detail throughout the book.
If there's one criticism to be leveled against this excellent book, it's that on occasion it reads more like an autopsy than a thoughtful analysis. Everyone expects Beyond Disruption to justifiably blow TBWA's horn. But there's a sense it strays into sales pitch mode from time to time. Possibly, an unavoidable occupational hazard.
That said, I can think of no better work on marketing theory and management written recently. By bringing great minds together and focusing them on the task at hand, Beyond Disruption is a roadmap to better advertising and clearer thinking. Now, if we can just get companies to start spending their ad dollars again...
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