"Disrupt or Die": TBWA's Leadership on a Fearless Creative Future
“Nothing heals the trauma of an acquisition like amazing work,” says Erin Riley.
Chaka, Jen and Erin are buzzing. It’s been six months since Omnicom acquired IPG and since then TBWA's global leadership trinity haven’t really spoken together to the media. There’s been, understandably, a lot of work to do, knitting together a new team of pirates and putting TBWA’s ‘The Disruption Company’ line to the test. And as serendipity (or strategy) would have it, they’re coming up for air just as a stream of bangers comes flooding in from around the network. Apple India’s treasure trove of comedic iPhone spots set in a sumptuous royal court. Axe’s wantonly silly take on soccer’s super-sized fandom, ahead of the World Cup. Timothée Chalamet’s nostalgic shaggy dog story for adidas.
“Did you see Brahma?” chips in Chaka Sobhani, referring to the exuberant football fiesta designed to cheer up pessimistic Brazilian fans as they head into this summer’s tournament by showcasing some of the team’s finest moments. It’s from Africa Creative, one of TBWA’s newest additions. It joined as one of the DDB brands that was brought into the fold, along with Chaka, who was previously DDB’s global CCO. The spot is being hailed by football influencers and media commentators as the ‘winner’ of World Cup advertising.
The chemistry between the three is positively effervescent -- Jen Costello and Chaka are together in the New York office and Erin is dialling in from a cab. She’s just landed back in the city after another ‘Disruption session’ with a local TBWA office and she makes it through the hectic traffic to join us a few minutes later. As they bounce back and forth, you can’t see the join between an original TBWA and a new addition -- it’s a true trinity. Of course, being part of the Omnicom multiverse, their paths had crossed before. Jen and Chaka had collaborated on the McDonald’s account on several occasions.
Erin reflects on the moment in December that the three realised the shape of the new TBWA and all of the talent and creative legacy they’d be bringing in from truly muscular businesses like DDB and MullenLowe. There’s also a number of more ‘boutique’ superstar brands like LOLA and adam&eve that have joined the ranks and, due to the complexities of the merger, a few others like FCB Canada that have transformed into a TBWA. “We do need to acknowledge that, particularly the human aspect of that change and transition,” Erin says. “But almost instantly we looked at each other and were like, holy shit. This is a powerhouse now. And the coming together particularly around the work and rallying around the thing that reminds us all why we do the thing that we do has been really powerful."
Jen recalls that just before the initial global management meeting in Los Angeles, she bumped into Chaka having a smoke on a bench outside the office. She ushered Jen over to have a peek at her laptop. The team had just cut together a new reel representing the cream of the creative work from across the newly expanded TBWA. It was a real megamix. “The hair on my arm stood up,” she says.
And the work really has been a rallying banner for this new collective as they’ve moved forward, agrees Chaka. “When you’ve got great work at the centre of the table, everyone starts to get excited. And I think this is the shared thing that was both in TBWA and in DDB, and in MullenLowe... There was a spirit of generosity, of, OK, we can all play together and we want to make each other's work better."
Staying focused on the work is no small thing while you’re navigating one of the biggest deals in advertising history, and as the whole industry is battered by a maelstrom of AI, macro economic turmoil, and consumer stress. Thankfully, then for TBWA, disruption is in its DNA. To this day, it proudly calls itself ‘The Disruption Company’, named after the methodology first invented by former global chairman Jean-Marie Dru in 1992.
Jen says the time is absolutely ripe for TBWA’s flavour of disruption. “AI and algorithms are flattening culture, there’s enshittification everywhere, CMOs are retreating... Disruption asks us actually to go, well, how do we flip that convention? Dystopian environments have always given way to outrageous disruptive creativity... We think this is kind of the golden age for disruption in a way because we are personally so tired of the whinging about how bad things are."
From a creative perspective, it’s a liberating philosophy, says Chaka. “Creativity dies in fear,” she says. “How do we flip it into something that feels exciting, feels possible, feels open-ended? And that's the thing ultimately that I love about disruption is that it can take you anywhere."
“I like the simplicity of a North Star of disruption,” she continues. “It's not convoluted, it doesn't feel like a bumper sticker, it feels true and real.”
A philosophy isn’t really worth much in the commercial sphere unless it translates into action, however. The leadership team was keenly aware that a few company-wide emails or virtual drop-ins would never be enough to ensure new teams would embrace disruption or that existing TBWA-ers would keep it at the forefront. And so Jen, Erin and Chaka have been whizzing all over the world to run intensive Disruption sessions to make sure that rebellious spirit wasn’t diluted.
“I think it would have been really easy, very efficient to do a virtual call and try to get everyone to understand the heart and soul and the methodology of disruption. But that just wouldn't be good enough,” says Jen. “It's a system for people that hate systems. So we want them to understand it so that they can then mess with it themselves."
To an extent, that disruption concept has also been integral to how TBWA has shepherded clients through the acquisition transition. “I think that the clients are also going through massive change and transformation. I don't think there's one client that hasn't rung us up with a brief of ‘we have to transform’. So I think that it is helping that we are all in it together, I think they are feeling many of the same pressures,” says Erin, reflecting on how it’s helped forge empathy and a sense of ‘shared ambition’ between TBWA and its clients.
The clients also now have access to a beefed up Omnicom data engine. But for Jen, Erin and Chaka, the path to success is to leverage those deep, sharp data-driven insights and tech with human taste, culture and craft. This year, the main theme to emerge from the agency’s annual Backslash trend report is ‘Proof of Human’, which found a real yearning for the offline world, for friction, discomfort and old fashioned connection and civility. Ultra-slick, data-honed experiences and content aren’t necessarily giving people the texture and satisfaction they want or creating the disruption that brands need.
Jen says it’s all about being considered and intentional with how you use these powerful tools. "’Proof of Human’ isn't about rejecting technology. It's actually about embracing the parts of the human experience that we refuse to automate or outsource, while absolutely getting obsessed and efficient and effective with the data, the technology, the intelligence, the new workflows...”
Jumping in, Erin describes this duality as one of the "beautiful juxtapositions that exists within TBWA", which boils down to a tension of "rigour and rebellion".
"[It’s about] precision being computational but also cultural. And I think that we now have arguably the deepest data stack you're going to find to get that computational precision right... but it is about these really well-orchestrated worlds. And that takes another form of precision which is cultural precision. It’s taste, it’s craft, it’s knowing exactly the right nuance to strike.”
As Erin casts her mind forward, it’s not just the ‘human versus tech’ false dichotomy that they’re looking to transcend. When she thinks about her ambition for TBWA and how she’ll judge the team’s success, she really wants the brand to rise above the narrow boxes laid out by the industry.
“We talk a lot about ‘categories of one’ for our clients, and so I think that is ultimately our ambition as an agency,” she says. “To be a category of one. To really transcend this whole narrative that is floating around about independents versus holdcos, about humans versus technology, about this, in some way fatalistic, view of creativity and creative agencies. We are always trying to reject boring and I think that is all becoming very boring.
“We have always defined ourselves as a ‘Disruption Company’ and I think that is bigger than any of those categories. So if the work continues to be as good as it is and our client partnerships stay as strong as they are and they continue to see the impact of the kind of creativity that we practise, I think we will be able to silence a lot of that. And we won’t be pigeonholed, we won’t be categorised.”
And from that refusal to be categorised should come even more surprising creative. “I'm excited about seeing ideas that we've never seen before, being able to play in places we never thought we could ever play in, being a place, a collective that our talent wants to stay in and spend a huge chapter of their life with,” says Chaka.
As the conversation flows and fizzes, there’s one question hanging in the air that feels both kind of trite but also unavoidable. No one here particularly wants to be known solely as the first all female leadership trio (CEO, CCO and CSO) of a major global advertising network of the scale of a TBWA but, well they are.
Jen ponders her ambivalence on the matter. On the one hand, the team wants to be judged on outcomes, not gender. But on the other, she says she’s been touched and shocked at the number of women who seek her out after presentations to tell her how motivational it is to see three women at the top.
Erin shares that having three women in the top spots is both remarkable and unremarkable. It’s also a testament to the fact that “within TBWA, strong women leaders have been a commitment for a long time”. She recalls that TBWA’s former global CEO (now CEO of Omnicom Advertising) Troy Ruhanen had declared that encouraging and developing female leadership was a priority over a decade ago. That commitment produced Jen and Erin, as well as BBDO’s current global CEO Nancy Reyes.
“It doesn't happen overnight,” says Erin. You have to grow generations of women leaders.”
For Chaka, while it’s an "indictment not just to the world but of this industry" that it’s taken until 2026 to see "three birds running a network or collective", what pulls the three of them together is so much bigger.
“Hopefully this is about three people who actually really dig each other. We've got the same sense of ambition, the same sense of passion, but also how we do it. We give a fuck about people, we give a fuck about the methodology of disruption, that's why we want to turn up. We don't want to make vanilla work. We want our clients excited, we want our people to be buzzing.”
And, judging by the work we’ve seen (and the tantalising promise from Chaka that there’s more to come), that buzz is certainly there. Sitting together six months in, the TBWA leadership trio is perfectly content to let the disruption speak for itself. They know the alternative to their aggressive, outcome-led approach is retreating into safety, something they categorically refuse to do.
"The alternative is being boring and beige and corporate and safe. And we are allergic to that in every way," Erin notes. "So alright, let's go. Let's disrupt or die."
