Adland (17 page)

One of the jewels in the network's crown was BETC, the Paris agency formed in 1994 by bringing together French talents Rémi Babinet, Mercedes Erra and Eric Tong Cuong. By that stage Euro RSCG had become bloated and firmly establishment – the new young agency was
designed to revive its creative image. On the evidence of the awards that have flooded in ever since, the gamble paid off. And BETC's Paris office is still possibly the coolest headquarters in town: an airy retro-futuristic space in the shell of a former 19th-century department store, where vintage chairs from the city's flea markets cosy up to Jean Nouvel desks. Needless to say, it bears little resemblance to the agency that Jacques Séguéla started above a café in 1970.

TBWA: absolutely European

In late 1970 an intriguing pamphlet fell onto the desks of several French business leaders. Its headline looked as if it was written in code: Tragos, Bonnange, Wiesendanger, Ajroldi.

The first page revealed that these were the names of four advertising men who had set out to solve a major problem facing European advertisers. The situation, the pamphlet explained, was this: after the war, despite the opening up of borders for international trade, European advertising agencies had largely failed to expand overseas. Not only were their accounts generally too small to fund the opening of offices abroad, but they felt linguistically and culturally tied to their domestic markets.

The big American agencies, on the other hand, had not been so apprehensive. The need to service multinationals such as Ford, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble had furnished them with ample reason to traverse the Atlantic. Once they'd set up branch offices in the major European capitals, they deigned to handle a few local accounts – provided there wasn't a client conflict. Their resources and experience were highly sought after; but their hearts lay in New York and Chicago. ‘For the American agencies,' the pamphlet claimed, pointedly, ‘European clients will always be a second priority.'

Bill Tragos (American of Greek descent), Claude Bonnange (French), Uli Wiesendanger (Swiss) and Paulo Ajroldi (Italian) had worked together at Young & Rubicam France. Now they intended to create the first European agency network: TBWA. It would set up shop in Paris and quickly open branches around Europe. Its vocation was not to be a creative boutique, but a major network capable of working with even the biggest clients. It would be ‘the first agency born international,' as Tragos put it.

Claude Bonnange, a strategic planning pioneer, had joined Young & Rubicam's Paris agency in 1964. ‘The agency was doing fine, but not much better than that,' he recalls over lunch in his Paris apartment. ‘So they brought in Bill Tragos, who'd turned around Y&R's Benelux operation in just 18 months. Bill called his old friend Paulo, whom he knew from Y&R in New York. And the quartet was completed by this young Swiss copywriter, Uli. Not only did we become friends, but we had totally complementary skills. Bill was management, I handled planning and research, Uli was the creative and Paulo was the account manager. In three years, we took the agency from 15th place to 3rd. And more than half its billings came from non-American clients.'

With success came temptation: all four received calls from other agencies (Bonnange recalls a conversation with Pierre Lemonnier of Impact, for example). This naturally pushed them down an alternative line of thinking: what if they set up their own agency? They had discussed the dominance of the American agency brands. They passionately believed that there was a need for a coordinated European network, rather than one cobbled together from agencies acquired here and there. ‘Built not bought,' was how Tragos would later describe the TBWA structure. ‘We sat down in Paulo's apartment and wrote the document that became the agency's mission statement,' says Bonnange. ‘Then we told Y&R that we were going to leave – and that they had a year to find replacements for us.' He chuckles. ‘That just shows you how much times have changed.'

Another event that would be unlikely to occur today came when the quartet finally quit Y&R. ‘We had such a good relationship with the media owners – the billboard companies and so on – that when they heard about our project, they offered us nine million francs [about US $1.7 million] worth of advertising space free of charge. So in August 1970 we were able to run posters, print ads and radio spots announcing the launch of TBWA, the first European advertising network.'

The quartet quickly received calls from advertisers intrigued by their proposition. Despite the fact that they had signed a non-competition agreement with their old agency – meaning that they couldn't take any accounts with them – by the end of their first year, they were making enough to open a Milan office. ‘We wanted to move fast because we knew that if we didn't expand out of Paris quickly enough, our pledge to become the first European network would start to lose its credibility,'
says Bonnange. A year later came Frankfurt – and then London, where TBWA engaged a young creative called John Hegarty.

Hegarty underlines the fact that TBWA was considerably ahead of its time. He observes that the very concept of ‘Europe' was still fuzzy back in the mid-1970s. ‘In those days if you talked about Europe to a British client, their eyes would glaze over,' he says. ‘“What's all this about? I'm not even interested in what's going on in Newcastle, so don't talk to me about Milan. That's somewhere you go on holiday.”'

But Europe was not enough: TBWA realized that to compete with the biggest players it needed a presence in the United States. In a diversion from its usual strategy, it acquired New York agency Baron, Costello & Fine. This merged outfit snagged what became TBWA's most famous account: Absolut.

The obscure vodka made by Sweden's Vin & Sprit was imported to the United States by a company called Carillon, headed by a dynamic French salesman named Michel Roux (not to be confused with the London chef of the same name). Roux had arrived in the United States in 1964 with a degree in hotel management and worked his way to the top slot at Carillon. ‘A classic liquor salesman, he… used to make a nightly tour of eight or ten Manhattan nightspots, staying out into the wee hours night after night while always managing to put in a full day at the office' (‘Absolut Michel Roux',
Business Week
, 4 December 2001). This was how Roux became a regular at Andy Warhol's legendarily bacchanalian Manhattan parties, an entrée that was to play a part in Absolut's success.

When Carillon hired TBWA in 1981, Bonnange and his team did some research to find out how consumers were likely to respond to Absolut. ‘We were given three pieces of advice,' says Bonnange. ‘First change the name, because Absolut sounds arrogant. Second change the bottle, because it looks like it's designed for urine samples. And third change the logo, because the blue lettering is printed directly onto the glass, which means you can't see it on the shelf. We took these results to Roux, who told us to ignore them. He said, “At least it doesn't look like anything else on the market. The bottle stays as it is.”'

TBWA's strategy – driven by the affable Roux – was to turn Absolut into a fashion accessory. The bizarrely shaped bottle was placed in every cutting-edge bar and nightclub in town. And to make sure opinion leaders knew exactly what it contained, the print advertising transformed the
bottle itself into a logo. The first ad, devised by TBWA's New York creative director Geoff Hayes, featured a bottle with a halo, and was entitled ‘Absolut perfection'. This visual pun set the template for every ad that followed. The number of executions now runs into the thousands – feverishly cut out, collected and traded by fans of the cult campaign. (The full rundown can be seen at a website called Absolut Ad, run not by the brand, but by a collector:
http://absolutad.com
.)

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.'