Jean-Marie Dru

Jean-Marie Dru, born January 24, 1947, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), is a French advertising executive, currently Chairman of TBWA, a global communications group based in New York. On June 23, 2015, he was elected president of UNICEF France.

Biography
Born to a merchant father (distribution of fresh products), and a graduate of HEC Paris, Jean-Marie Dru joined Dupuy-Compton (now Saatchi & Saatchi France) in 1971, an agency of which he quickly became creative director. From 1979, he was general director of Young & Rubicam, which he left in 1984 to create with three partners (Jean-Claude Boulet, Marie-Catherine Dupuy and Jean-Pierre Petit) a new advertising agency called BDDP (Boulet Dru Dupuy Petit), from the Snip 4 agency.

In the early 1990s, poor management of BDDP's accounts pushed the agency to the brink of bankruptcy. After several years of financial difficulties, BDDP was bought in 1998 by Omnicom, the world's leading communications group, which merged it with another network of agencies, TBWA. Jean-Marie Dru takes the helm of the entity thus created, which retains the name TBWA. In 2001, he was named president and CEO of TBWA Worldwide. He left the presidency of the group in 2007, replaced by Tom Carroll, but retained a position of chairman.

Jean-Marie Dru is the author of the concept of “disruption” (close to the concept of creative disruption, which he initially defined in 1984 as “creative leap”), which he develops in several works devoted to advertising creation, innovation and communication. This intellectual technique is one of the pillars of TBWA's corporate culture.

Books

 * Le Saut créatif (Ed. Jean-Claude Lattès, 1984)
 * Disruption (Ed. Village mondial, 1997)
 * Disruption Live, ouvrage collectif (Ed. Village Mondial, 2002, ISBN 2744060356)
 * La Publicité autrement (Gallimard, 2007, ISBN 2070782913)
 * Jet lag (Grasset, 2011, ISBN 2246790123)
 * ''The Ways to New: 15 Paths to Disruptive Innovation' (Ed. Wiley, 2015 ISBN 9781119167976)
 * Thank you for disrupting : Les philosophies disruptives des grands dirigeants d'entreprise (Ed. Wiley, 2019 ISBN 9781119575658)