DUBAI: Creative advertising network TBWA and its parent company Omnicom are looking forward to reinforcing their presence in Saudi Arabia, said Troy Ruhanen, global CEO of TBWA.
“We’re committing to really building a future there (Saudi Arabia),” which included working with more local clients and developing Saudi talent, he said during a recent visit to the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
From Jan. 1, 2025, Ruhanen will serve as the global CEO of the newly formed organization Omnicom Advertising Group, which brings together the group’s creative and advertising agencies and networks BBDO, DDB, TBWA, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Zimmerman, and others.
As he prepares for the new role, Ruhanen said that he is eager to explore the (Saudi) marketplace” from both perspectives: TBWA’s to finish the year and Omnicom Advertising Group’s to look at possibilities for next year.
This June, as a testament to its commitment to the Kingdom, Omnicom announced the establishment of a Middle East regional headquarters in Riyadh, bringing together 10 Omnicom agency brands including BBDO, DDB, TBWA, OMD, PHD, Hearts and Science, and FleishmanHillard.
Currently, TBWA has a mix of local and international talent in Saudi Arabia, partly owing to global clients, because “there are people who are more familiar with those global clients right now,” Ruhanen said.
However, he added that the network plans “to grow a very locally informed, local leadership kind of base.
“We know that’s our destiny, and it’s just a matter of making sure that we plan ourselves and transition ourselves to that right place.”
TBWA has several proprietary platforms and units such as Backslash, self-described as a cultural intelligence unit; NEXT, a global innovation practice based on analytics and strategy; and the Collective AI Platform to harness the power of artificial intelligence for employees and clients.
Launched in June, Collective AI is a suite of generative AI services powered by partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Google.
“AI is not meant to be an answer machine,” but rather “a catalyst for original thinking,” Ruhanen said.
The platform has been built by feeding in various strategies, case studies, and so on, to make it a more “informed practice,” he said.
In terms of the adoption of AI, Ruhanen said there were some “mature corporations” that understood the current boundaries of AI such as regulation and privacy, and there are others who “want to talk about how they’re doing all of these things all at once.”
TBWA’s priority was to protect its clients while also experimenting, within legal boundaries, to see what was possible, he said.
The conversation around AI tended to be dominated by the idea of efficiency and speeding up the creative process, which was the wrong way of looking at it, he said.
He added: “It’s about enabling a better, more accurate, and more informed way of working, (which) is giving us the best place to launch our creative minds and come up with the original solutions that no one has ever seen.
“It can’t be about an efficiency mindset; it has got to be about a growth mindset.”
Addressing concerns about AI’s threat to human talent, Ruhanen recounted a 1994 article by technology magazine WIRED with the headline “Is Advertising Dead?” Over the years, there have been several such articles questioning the role of advertising and agencies in an increasingly digital world.
However, in the past three decades, advertising agencies have “grown tremendously,” he said.
AI will not replace human talent or creative agencies, but will “change the nature of how we operate and the skills we’re going to require,” which means there will be a shift “from a service mindset to much more of a strategic mindset,” Ruhanen said.
“A lot of people have predicted what the future of this business is going to look like, and they’ve been sorely wrong for many years,” he said.
