David Droga, daydream believer

Australia’s hottest creative export David Droga whose multi-million dollar Hollywood deal is set to change the face of advertising. Photo: Andrew Quilty

Paul McIntyre

A minute’s walk from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lies Hollywood’s oldest talent agency. William Morris Endeavor Entertainment oozes “A-listers” – from Charlize Theron to Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe and hundreds of others. The firm has a pedigree of box office stars going back to Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Straddling this star-spangled empire are two chief executives who personify Hollywood. “Super agent” Ari Emanuel is the brother of President Obama’s former chief-of-staff turned Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the character upon which the edgy TV series Entourage and its Hollywood talent agent, Ari Gold, is based. Patrick Whitesell is the other joint CEO, another power player in the entertainment industry, who counts Hugh Jackman, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon among his entourage.

The two fast-talking, deal-making players merged their rival celebrity and artist management firms in 2009 to create WME, an agency that vies with Creative Artists Agency as the most influential gatekeeper of the feature film, music and television industry. How influential? Well, in August when Warner Bros anointed Ben Affleck as the next Batman – to widespread uproar from fans – it was Patrick Whitesell who cut the deal.

The month before Whitesell and Emanuel had closed another deal that reverberated all the way from Hollywood to Madison Avenue and beyond. Acutely aware that digital media and technology is usurping old hierarchies and the once-lucrative business models of the entertainment industry, they paid an estimated $US115 million ($125 million) for almost half of an advertising agency. Not just any old agency but Droga5, the New York hot shop founded by David Droga, Australia’s most renowned, internationally awarded and youthful advertising creative export.

Set up in 2006, Droga5 blitzed the advertising establish-ment with pioneering and unconventional ad campaigns. “We’ve been courted by everybody and we’ve politely said no because I think the majority of the acquisitions that happen make the industry smaller not better,” Droga told the New York Times in his only interview at the time of the deal. “So many alliances or deals are done out of necessity.”

Eight weeks later on a couch in his New York office on the corner of 4^th Street and Lafayette, a block down from New York University’s Stern School of Business, Droga is still holding the line. A quietly spoken, understated yet frightfully ambitious character, he is determined to bring creativity into the heart of commerce. It’s been a constant for more than two decades – he’s just turned 45. “I’ve always said I want to build one of the most influential creative businesses in the world,” he declares with a wry grin.

His new partners had been on the hunt for an adland acquisition for a year. They knew their artists needed to get into bed with big brands in a way that was vastly more imaginative than the standard celebrity endorsement. Droga had shown everyone how with a show-stopper from hip hop’s biggest artist, Jay-Z, and Microsoft-owned Bing – a benchmark for coining it without selling out. The campaign, which won Droga yet another Grand Prix at the prestigious Cannes Advertising Festival, simultaneously launched Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded while creating an art-led, digital and mainstream media campaign for Bing. Google’s search arch-rival sent out a series of online clues that linked with street art through which fans could track down locations where various events in Jay-Z’s life had happened – much of it around his childhood roots in Brooklyn. It is the sort of “new-world” advertising that progressive brand owners are hankering for. They want their brands entwined with entertainment and pop culture rather than hard-sell and commercial messages that often fail to fire up the masses. That work was what put Droga at the top of Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell’s shopping list.

Best in the business

“It was pretty easy to work out David is the best in the business today,” says an impeccably attired Whitesell, from his WME office overlooking downtown Beverly Hills. “The work he’s done with brands is above and beyond, so that’s where it started. That combination of what Ari and I need and everything we are doing here is what David and his group are doing there. We’ve seen isolated events and experiences that can happen but it’s never come together holistically.”

For Whitesell and Emanuel – the latter is said to sleep a maximum of three or four hours a night – it’s all about content. “Content for us is only going to get bigger and more important,” Whitesell says. “The fragmentation of media and the disruptiveness of technology is changing everything. Television and feature films are changing like you’ve seen with live music. In all of those areas, advertisers are getting closer to the content and frankly, the content creators need to create a better, more direct relationship with them.”

Not dissimilar to the nascent days of broadcast TV when business models were busted open, digital media and technology is providing fertile ground for Hollywood and Madison Avenue to rethink how they operate and interact. Until now, however, no one has been able to get it right.

WME’s arch rival, Creative Artists Agency, unnerved Madison Ave more than a decade ago when it started dealing directly with the world’s biggest advertiser, Coca-Cola, to make ads – the early versions of Coke’s Polar Bears theme came out of CAA. And Hollywood directors and producers have flirted with making commercials for decades. Ridley Scott is among the most renowned with his “1984” campaign for Apple. But, like CAA’s tie-up with Coke, attempts to reboot alliances have mostly crashed.

Four decades of separation have made it tough for the world’s biggest advertising networks and Hollywood to sync, although Whitesell says such alignments are more crucial than ever. Indeed, WME’s equity stake in Droga5 and the aggressive ambitions of the three creative entrepreneurs to do things differently is probably the best chance yet to see if Hollywood and Madison Ave can produce some magic beyond the common practice of product placement where BMW or Jaguar might pay producers to have James Bond drive one of its cars.

“It’s the daydreamers that change things,” says Droga. “It is the practical people that make it happen but you need the daydreamers, the storytellers and the creative people for anything interesting to happen.”

His own man

That David Droga shunned the advertising establishment and sold a stake in his company to a hot Hollywood firm spooked the big international advertising agencies. For years bosses from ad net-works in Tokyo, Paris, London and New York had been beating on Droga’s door to buy into the agency he owned with a handful of employees. They figured one of their own would eventually win Droga over. But they were wrong.

“I’ve always wanted to do work that is more than what a lot of the advertising industry is about,” Droga says. “I wanted to work across politics, social good and Wall Street; to help figure out where growth comes from. How do you take billion-dollar brands and make something more of them in the next 10 or 20 years? That’s why WME felt like a natural fit. They are the best at what they do in entertainment and content. If we could complement each other but also do things that have never been done before, that’s got to be worth a crack. It’s going to be amazing because the consumer doesn’t care where they get content from, whether that’s commercial messaging or entertainment. So now it’s how can we take the best of WME’s abilities – their access to the entertainment industry, their ability to package things up and influence pop culture – and combine it with our abilities in creative and strategy on brands and really make something of it. Neither of us had to tweak our language about what our aspirations were.” 

Aspiration is putting it mildly. Relentless, unbridled ambition to dominate is more apt on both sides of this deal. And somewhat ironically, the two modern-day creative super groups are headed back to the future. Or at least the halcyon days of the 1950s when the links between brands, Hollywood and the booming TV industry were at their zenith.

David Droga is the youngest of five brothers raised in the NSW alpine town of Jindabyne. Their Danish mother labelled her sons’ clothing with their surname and chronology. Droga1, Marcus, is a senior investment advisor with Macquarie Bank. Droga2, Ari, is the Australian boss of Global Infrastructure Partners. Droga3, Daniel, co-founded hedge fund BlueLake Partners. Droga4, Jeremy, is a sculptor in Paris. Their sister, Annika, leads Social Altitude Treks, an NGO that raises money for single mothers in India.  (A half sister, Jessica, works for online publisher BeautyHaven). Their late father Harold was known as “black Harry” because he was “quite a tough operator”, says Droga5. Harry, who ran the Perisher ski resort for nearly two decades for Kerry Packer, actively stoked intense sibling rivalry. He would take his sons out on Lake Jindabyne, forcing them to jump into the freezing water and swim to shore to toughen them up. “To this day, every one of us has a phobia of water, cold water,” David Droga says. “He wanted us to have that bonding. When he and Mum split, he left the kids the boat. I think it was sold before the afternoon was over.”

Maternal role model

From their political and environmental activist mother Vibeke, who is also a poet, the Droga kids learned the not-so-fine art of persuasion, being pushed to ring local MPs to agitate on anything from saving the whales to halting the logging of old growth forests. Droga talks fondly of his mother as the “family matriarch and compass”. Like his older brothers, Droga was shipped off to boarding school at Tudor House near Bowral in NSW and then onto Kings, where he excelled at being average.

He wanted to be a writer of some kind and it was not until he got a break as a teenage despatch boy at Grey Advertising, where Siimon Reynolds was emerging, that his ambition took some shape. That was the late 1980s when Reynolds was making his name as a creative wunderkind with ads like the Grim Reaper AIDS TV commercial. Droga had earlier done work experience in John Singleton’s advertising agency where he spent the week washing the adman’s line-up of prestige cars. “I remember thinking, wow, I’ll never make someone do that.” At Grey, Droga delivered the mail to the creative department’s desks and would take sneak peaks at the ads. “I would say to myself ‘I can write better than that’, or so I thought.”

Droga at that stage was sleeping on Marcus’s sofa in Tamarama, near Bondi beach. Within two years he was at OMON, the new agency Reynolds and two partners kicked off in 1988. Shortly after, they created the award-winning Triple M TV commercial featuring a winged satyr. It had a production budget of $1 million, massive in those days.

At 23, Droga  had a reputation as a relentless worker, regularly burning through midnight on briefs, tearing up iterations and starting over. “I don’t know if it’s a work thing or it’s paranoia,” says Droga, who lives near his New York offices and returns to work once his four children are in bed. “I like to believe I’m very good but the work ethic guarantees you. I used to think if I’m as talented as I think I am and if I work really hard it will take me over the edge.”

The approach worked but Droga was becoming frustrated by personality politics among OMON’s partners and handed back his shareholding for zip. “It was funny because the celebrity of Siimon took off so quickly,” he recalls. “I felt he got distracted from the agency. He was on all of the people to watch lists and the sexiest man stuff.”

In 1996 Droga finally succumbed to wooing from Saatchi  Saatchi’s worldwide creative director Bob Isherwood and took a job as the regional creative director across Asia and the Middle East, based in Singapore. He was the youngest creative director in Saatchi’s global network. Within a year, the Singapore office was scooping the world’s top advertising awards. “I wanted to prove you could be great from Asia,” he says of a time when the Brits, Americans and the fanatical Brazilians dominated the global advertising scene. He regrets seeing little of Asia other than from planes, offices and perhaps a few bars. “I worked my arse off, we became global agency of the year at Cannes and we became an agency the Singapore government rallied around. It was an amazing time. I travelled a lot but didn’t explore Cambodia or the beaches of Vietnam.”

Saatchi beckons

Droga’s trajectory was such that within two years he was offered one of the most prestigious but troubled jobs in adland: creative director of Saatchi’s flagship London office. It was 1998 and he was 29, preceded only by two other big name creatives plus Maurice Saatchi, who had been dumped by investors from the agency he and his brother Charles founded. The reaction among the Brits inside Saatchi’s London office to the announcement of a blow-in from Jindabyne was cold.

“It was such a chilled reception when I got there – so over the top, really cynical and distant. You can imagine you’re at Saatchi in London and there’s an Aussie coming in who’s under 30 but not only that, he’s come via Singapore. Their reception was so cold it actually had the reverse effect. I remember thinking, right, game-on, I’ll show you.”

Droga shook up the old hierarchies, allowing emerging writers and art directors to have a go on some of the most prestigious client brands, those usually reserved for the agency’s Don Draper-like glamour creatives. “Very early on I took away the ghettos because most agencies have star [creative] teams. But again it was brick by brick. It was a closed-door type of place, everyone was suited and booted and I was very different. I was scrappy. I was sitting in people’s offices and talking about the work for as long as it took. That’s my favourite thing today. I want a brainstorm and that’s probably the only thing I’m good at. So I’d spend all my days just wandering the corridors, talking to people about their work, giving them my thoughts. I fought very hard and good work started to get through the system. The whole body language of the creative department changed drastically. There was someone on their side. That was probably a year in. Then it became an amazing entity.”

But after three years, Droga’s ambitious restlessness kicked in. There was talk of him being groomed as a successor to Isherwood, a position he says today that he didn’t want. “I didn’t want to sort of interfere, like I was knocking on his door,” Droga says. “I love London but I wanted to move beyond Saatchi in London. I started predicting the conversations I was going to have.”

The Paris based chairman and CEO of Saatchi’s parent Publicis, Maurice Levy, recruited him as worldwide creative director with a blank canvas to turn it into a creative powerhouse. He chose to base himself in New York but three years later he’d had enough of the big, financially driven multinational groups.

In 2006, with the blessing of Levy and some initial funding from Publicis, Droga set up his own shop using his mum’s monicker. Droga5 quickly made an impact with big and small brands from Puma to Prudential, Microsoft and Coke Zero. And he stormed the awards. Among Droga’s early work was a mockumentary for fashion designer Marc Ecko in which he repainted a Boeing to look like the US presidential plane, Air Force One, and then filmed what appeared to be graffiti artists breaching security to paint the words “Still Free” on the fuselage. When most were still working out what YouTube was, Droga uploaded the video and the streetwear maker got global exposure.

Brash campaigns

Droga has continued that brash program of brand projects, traversing campaigns for street and challenger brands along with the big names. He has also created an experimental technology lab. Even the institutions of power have jumped on the Droga5 train – last year the United Nations signed up. For their first project, Beyonce sang inside the UN to launch World Humanitarian Day and the agency used its lab-developed Thunderclap to spread messages far and fast through online social networks.

With the WME deal, Droga and his 400-plus creatives in New York, Sydney and a new London office are in heaven. Brands that have been busting to align themselves with the entertainment sector are gushing, including some of Australia’s biggest. “It’s the most exciting and forward-thinking deal to happen in modern communications,” says Telstra’s influential chief marketing officer, Mark Buckman, who also heads the telco’s push into digital content and digital TV platforms. “It’s the most impressive amalgamation of creative assets in generations with a unique combination of digital technology, venture capital, media and entertainment that is going to bring new possibilities for blending talent, music and brands.”

As for Droga, well, he’s hell-bent on taking his old stomping ground in advertising to new frontiers. With some symbolism he has just shunned Madison Ave, long the home of venerable international advertising agencies, and signed up for digs in the heart of New York’s financial district, at 120 Wall Street.

 “I’m in a different industry to that,” he declares of the Madison Avenue crowd. “I’m trying to sort of push into places no one is going or very few have gone. I’m trying to take myself into uncharted waters. Usually for the brands that make a difference, creativity is the game changer. That is true of society, in advertising and in life.”

David Droga, daydream believer