If Disruption Were Currency, What Would It Be Worth?
Pedro Pérez believes ideas never die. The TBWA\Chiat\Day LA CCO has long been an advocate for relentless curiosity and thinks creativity can transform societies, but he says it takes disruption.
It’s a word that pervades creative talk, which has inevitably led to dilution of meaning. When I ask Pedro how true disruption manifests itself, he says it’s in ideas that shake people with something undeniable, unmissable; something that just can’t be ignored. “When an idea makes people stop, then nod, then say, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” – That’s when I know it’s real. I then walk around the agency wanting to share this idea with everyone; it’s a contagious feeling.”
At Chiat\Day LA, he’s created a guide and barometer to get the team to the very types of ideas that are inherently disruptive and coded with their “Pirate DNA”. The formula asks three questions:
- Is the idea impossible to ignore?
- Does the idea invent the future?
- Does the idea transform society in some way?
It demands they take the pulse of what makes and shakes culture, “humanising the power of innovation and technology and utilising the power of behavioural shifts that change society."
It’s the kind of thing that guided the ‘Caption with Intention’ campaign that cleaned up at Cannes this year. Pedro was the driving force behind the project which aimed to revolutionise how deaf people experience film by creating a system that uses animation, colour, and typography to convey emotion, tone, and pacing.
It was one of those rare campaigns that created cultural ripples, and Pedro says how ambition is framed at the beginning of an idea is what matters. “Fame-making ideas, they don’t happen by accident – they are born from curiosity; from asking the unexpected question that then follows an uncompromising pursuit of a disruptive creative solution,” he explains. This shift, according to Pedro, makes teams think beyond formats and preconceived norms of how advertising should act and “creates work that reimagines something new”.
Consistency is a word that comes up a lot with Pedro, especially when it comes to consistency in being different. But how do you maintain that duality of consistency and differentiation when working across brands, briefs, and teams? Pedro recognises the contradiction of terms but asserts, “Consistency can become a form of differentiation. By holding every piece of work to a high creative standard, we establish a recognisable consistency in how we solve problems.
“And because each client and brief bring their own unique needs, the actual outputs are always different by design. The constant is our bar for creativity; the variable is the way it comes to life.”
If disruption were a currency today, its most valuable denominations for Pedro would be threefold: idea, culture, participation. “The idea becomes the soul that informs how the brand behaves. The culture connects to what people care about, not just what brands want to say, and participation is priceless because true disruption doesn’t just get noticed; it becomes part of people’s routine,” says Pedro.
“That's where I'd invest. Not in a single platform or format, but in ideas that move audiences from spectators to participants, that will make people feel.”
