DISRUPTIVE INFLUENCE
TBWA’s global CEO, Troy Ruhanen, tells Austyn Allison why his network is revising its core philosophy
Troy Ruhanan, the CEO of Omnicom creative network TBWA Worldwide, says that 2022 is going to be “a turning point for creative to come back with real energy”. Not just for his agency but for the industry as a whole.
He says: “There’s too much work that looks too similar right now. So it’s an opportunity for brands to step out of their comfort zone, either in the forms and mediums that they’re using, or the innovations that they’re making. Even the established ones are going to have to break through.”
Ruhanen was in the region recently to visit TBWA\Raad, the regional network of the group. Ruhanen says TBWA’s work at the moment is “good”, but he wants to see greater aspirations for the quality of the creative. The industry must remove its crutches and generate “positive envy” within agencies and clients alike. When the industry is in what Ruhanen calls “a sea of mediocrity”, no one is holding up “shining torches” to show their partners and competitors how much better the work can be. As part of its roadmap to a creative renaissance, TBWA has begun to reinvent Disruption. That’s Disruption with a capital D, the agency’s philosophy since its chairman Jean-Marie Dru introduced the concept back in 1992. The concept involves changing a marketplace by upending traditional conventions. Disruption has served TBWA well. Agencies need a philosophy, says Ruhanen, who also mentions “A truth well told” at McCann and BBDO’s “The work, the work, the work” as examples that “are very clearly articulated, and then you build a methodology underneath.” However, he laments that many other networks have lost to explain what they stand for.
Ruhanen explains the sort of conventions TBWA seeks to overturn: “If I said to you, ‘Picture a health care ad,’ right now, you would probably picture a couple walking down the beach with a Labrador running around in the background.” But what do you do to counter the norm?
The answer isn’t as simple as just swapping out cliched imagery. Ruhanen says: “What we’re trying to say is don’t break the convention just in execution; break the convention in business strategy as well, and do that much earlier in the process.”
It’s this desire to tackle the cause not the symptoms of ordinariness that has led to an internal upgrade at the agency. Since the start of Covid-19, Disruption has been reimagined at TBWA as ‘Disruption X’.
The onset of the pandemic in March 2020 was the spur to start changing. It moved the industry “back in time in a good way,” says Ruhanen. He explains that, “Instead of being felt to be the creative partner to a client, we became again much more of a business partner to our clients.”
This gave the creative industry permission to make more of an impact “upstream”, edging away from the marketing departments of client brands and into their board rooms.
By May of last year the modules that make up Disruption X were laid out, and companywide training began at the start of 2021.
TBWA is working towards a goal common to many agencies in recent years: competing with consultancies such as Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey to become more of a business transformation partner and less of a creative execution partner to clients.
Ruhanen admits that TBWA competes with consultancies, but says the agency is focused on different outcomes. Its end goal is solutions, and solving problems fast so it can move on to the next challenge. By comparison, a consultancy will often have done its job well if it entrenches itself within its client’s ongoing operations. “Our industry is driven to complete,” says Ruhanen.
“You should only amplify if you have a really strong core platform,” he says. “If you don’t have a strong brand and a strong message, you’re only adding to your own clutter by doing a whole bunch of different things. But if you’ve got a really strong brand platform and then you’re able to extend that into great new territories, then it really puts that added gloss on to the brand in many