TBWA’s New Leaders on Selling Disruption in Turbulent Times

TBWA has researched how brands are contributing to “culture rot” as terms like “enshittification” and “AI slop” come to describe the internet. The goal is to help clients build enduring platforms that contribute to culture versus chasing micro-trends. 

Costello pointed to the work TBWA has done for Levi’s as an example. The work is “reimagining iconic Levi’s advertising through the Black female gaze, through Beyoncé’s narrative lens,” she said. But it also extended into culture through editorial partnerships with Complex Media and HypeBae, and with agile marketing moves, like changing Levi’s social handles to “Levii’s” after the artist dropped the song “Levii’s Jeans.”

“There was power in the idea. There was power in the craft. And it’s an idea that you pull through in a lot of different environments and people feel surrounded by it,” Costello said.  

Executing this type of work has required building new skills around PR and earned attention, as it gets harder to “separate the best ideas from the amplification plans,” Costello said. 

Internally, TBWA is using AI to automate tasks like research, reporting, and note taking, while reinvesting that time in “supercharged creative, strategic, and amplification thinking,” Riley said. The agency has also launched new specialties in areas like B2B and design. 

“Those are things that we would have had to fund incrementally before. Now we are able to put more robust energy there because we’re finding efficiencies in other parts of the business,” she said. 

Getting comfortable with uncertainty

It’s not just TBWA’s clients experiencing change. In the past year, the agency underwent a leadership transition, entered a new operating unit under OAG, and is waiting to see whether Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of rival holding company IPG will pass regulatory approval. 

“There’s no denying that it is a particularly uncertain environment,” Riley said. “What we’ve been telling everyone is, ‘you’ve got to get comfortable with that.’” 

Comfort in change extends to TBWA’s leadership team, which is learning to embrace collaboration across OAG agencies that were historically competitive.

“At first we were all a little bit like, ‘Wait, what’s happening?’” Riley said of the new structure. “Now we’re like, ‘it’s people that we know and respect.’ It’s just expanded our community of smart brains that we can harness.”