“Nobody knows anything.” — William Goldman, screenwriter.

Back in 1992, while Nirvana was breaking into cultural consciousness by assailing the consumerism behind a girl’s underarm deodorant, on the other side of the spectrum, there was a canny advertising agency chairman performing his own jiujitsu on the culture.

It didn’t smell like Teen Spirit, but it came up smelling like roses in the advertising world and eventually everywhere else.

Jean-Marie Dru of TBWA (then BDDP) published full-page advertisements in a handful of the world’s leading newspapers boasting the headline “Disruption,” followed by its new methodology: foment radical change in a marketplace by defying existing conventions and assumptions (and usually on behalf of one’s clients). 

“Disruption” is also  mindset — a deliberate challenge to the status quo and a salvo against conventional thinking. It starts with identifying entrenched norms, shakes them loose with a bold, radically new idea, and then aims that new idea toward a visionary goal, reframing the future of a brand or business.

Dru formalized the concept in his 1996 book, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace. As anyone who’s ever endured a pitch meeting with a garden variety “visionary” knows, Dru’s concept has cycled through every conceivable industry’s boardrooms and business books. 30-plus years hence, TBWA remains as committed to the notion as ever. They even trademarked the word worldwide — Disruption®. 

I mean, WTF™, right?

Now that we’re entering another bout of political and social unrest and uncertainty, it’s time to revisit the concept of creative disruption, especially as it pertains to my culture industry bailiwicks—arts, entertainment, and media—a.k.a. the Creative Economy (not to be confused with the “creator economy,” which remains the greatest open mic night in the history of humankind).

Also called the “Orange Economy” for reasons I have yet to understand, the creative economy, according to this United Nations circular (PDF here) “…embraces economic, cultural and social aspects interacting with technology, intellectual property, and tourism objectives: it is a set of knowledge-based, and thus more localized, economic activities with a development dimension and cross-cutting linkages at macro and micro levels to the overall economy.” 

So, yeah, that needs to be disrupted. And translated into English.

The point is that every one of the pursuits enumerated above (and others I’ve omitted) is part of a cultural-industrial complex experiencing massive disruption in how it’s made and monetized. We can thank Silicon Valley yahoos for fomenting this seismic shift and its overreliance on data and relative lack of emphasis on gut (where, remarkably, we also have neurons).

From Generative AI to more user data than our species’ collective DNA, we are swimming in a tsunami of disruptive data that has recontoured how artistic expression is discovered, delivered, and determined to be culturally relevant. Even TBWA’s Disruption® is backstopped proprietary analytics — the irony.

When it comes to creativity, data is doom. My thinking here is informed, in part, by an observation by FX Chief John Landgraf on Matt Belloni’s entertainment industry podcast The Town:

“…Data can tell you what’s worked before. It doesn’t tell you what’s going to work in the future,” said Landgraf in an episode about Silicon Valley’s effect on Hollywood, which, in a word, has been chilling. But as Landgraf sagely pointed out, algorithms don’t know anything and “…will never because what data was going to tell you that the of the pent-up and unseen demand for Star Wars?” 

He adds, “The algorithm doesn’t know because the consumer doesn’t know, and that’s what the artist’s job is to try to tune into these distant, very faint signals that no one’s ever heard before.”

Creative disruption born of artists’ intuition and instinct will be culture’s salvation. It’s too wily and weird to predict, anticipate, or algorithmize. Steve Jobs observed, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” 

Disrupt the disruption.