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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 home 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'

E
very 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 content: 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?'

Under Marco, Testa's ads abandoned the saccharine of the
Carosello
era and became faster, wittier, and more transatlantic in inspiration. Yet one of the challenges facing the Italian industry is its relatively lacklustre performance on the international awards circuit, leading to the impression that the country is no longer a source of groundbreaking creative work. The Brits and the Americans have led the field for years; but the Thais and the Brazilians also attract far more plaudits. The Italian jeans brand Diesel may have produced a string of innovative, award-winning advertising campaigns – but none of them were made by Italian agencies. It's a subject that preoccupies Armando Testa creative director Maurizio Sala – and a situation he is determined to change. He
believes the answer lies not in aping the work of US or British agencies, but in redefining Italian advertising.

‘Recently I sat down to consider the elements of Italian culture that could be reflected in our advertising. The most obvious one is humour. Italians are very relationship oriented. They like to talk, they like to gesture… and they like to laugh. In general, their humour is quite innocent – it's warm and southern. British humour tends to be crueller, darker and more cynical than ours. For some reason we don't seem able to express our own style of humour in advertising.'

His second big Italian plus-point is ‘style'. ‘We have a strong heritage when it comes to fashion, film, design and graphics. I think we should look back at some our triumphs in these areas and try to identify our own visual style, which we can then apply to our advertising.'

While Armando Testa is greatly admired at home, international accounts are still proving elusive. Despite the fact that it has offices in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Brussels – and longstanding partnerships with agencies in more than 100 countries around the world – these generally service Italian clients. But is it necessary to become a moderately successful global network when you are already a phenomenally successful domestic one, with clients that have trusted you, in some cases, for more than 40 years? The family-owned Armando Testa remains Italy's most powerful agency brand. It is, as its website states, ‘the world's largest Italian agency'.

Copywriting, Italian style

If Armando Testa is the father of Italian advertising, then the late Emanuele Pirella was at the very least the father of Italian copywriting; Italy's answer to David Ogilvy in the United States, David Abbott in the UK and Pierre Lemonnier in France. He gave his name to the agency Lowe Pirella. He died in 2010, but lives on in an interview conducted for the first edition of this book.

Pirella knew he had been born to write. After a degree in modern literature he took up his pen, never to put it down again. Determined to spill ink for a living, he wrote day and night. He wrote short stories for children, cinema reviews for a daily newspaper, copy for comics and cartoons – even a history of Italy from Ancient Rome to the post-war
years, dashed out with three other journalists. ‘I knew I was a good writer,' he recalled, ‘quick, funny, accurate, and able to put a paradoxical spin on a sentence. And I sold that attitude.'

In short, Pirella was a natural for advertising – but until he stumbled into a copywriting job by accident, he knew almost nothing about the industry. ‘At that time, advertising in Italy was still a mysterious world. Few people had heard of these entities called “advertising agencies”. They thought that inside companies there must be a secret room where a guy sat doing a job that was a mixture of advertising and public relations.'

When he moved from his home town of Parma to Milan in the early 1960s, he looked for a job at a newspaper or a printing company. Then one of his friends told him about a job as junior copywriter at an American advertising agency, Young & Rubicam. With armloads of written work to his credit, Pirella glided into the job. Most of the agency's employees were English or American, but Pirella found his creative ‘other half' at Y&R in German art director Michael Göttsche. Together, the pair went on to devise slick, funny advertising in the vein of (naturally) the ads being created in the States by Doyle Dane Bernbach.

‘I wasn't getting paid much at first, so I'd be making ads during the day and doing freelance work at night,' said Pirella. ‘I was lucky with my first couple of campaigns and in my second year at the agency – this was 1965 – I was named Copywriter of the Year. That meant I could demand a salary increase and give up some of my out-of-hours activities.'

Nevertheless, he didn't entirely abandon freelance work. A lengthy collaboration with the news magazine
L'Espresso
, for whom he wrote a TV review column, ended only recently. And he still creates satirical cartoons with a friend, the artist Tullio Pericoli.

But with more recognition and a decent wage under his belt, Pirella was now firmly hooked on advertising. ‘It seemed to me that we were the best agency in Italy – the one that was using the most expensive photographers and directors, with an American copy chief, an English creative director, German and English art directors… All around us the other agencies were making dull and phoney advertising; typical home-grown Italian stuff, featuring poorly conceived illustrations with the product always in use.'

Pirella stayed at Young & Rubicam for five years, followed by a two-year stint at Ogilvy & Mather. Then, with Michael Göttsche and another
colleague, Gianni Muccini, he went into business, launching Agenzia Italia in 1971. ‘For 10 years, we were the most creative agency in the business. We worked like hell, night and day and all weekend, just because it was fun to find new ways to say the usual things – to challenge one another.'