Last 12th of April, the APG launched in association with The Guardian, an online live Q&A session with none other than David Droga as part of a series on strategy called Worlds Collide.
Mr Droga is notably one of the most influential creatives alive and certainly the most awarded (over 70 Cannes Lions, including 6 Grand Prix and 4 Titanium lions) with a career that could outrun the Millenium Falcon:
Partner and Executive Creative Director of an Ad agency in Australia at 22 he helped it win “Australian Agency of the Year” twice and “Ad of the Year” four times.
From there he moved country and agency and settled into Singapore where he was to head Saatchi & Saatchi’s Asia Region helping it achieve “Regional Network of the Year” (Media Marketing) and helping Singapore obtain the “International Agency of the Year” award (Ad Age). By 29 he was in London heading Saatchi & Saatchi as Executive Creative Director (the Millenium Falcon could have reached this no sooner than 31).
Having conquered Asia, then Europe, he then moved to the US to become the first-ever Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of the Publicis Network.
From there he started his own company Droga 5 in 2006. Their mantra? “Creatively Led. Strategically Driven. Technology Friendly. Humanity Obsessed”. And so far so good great incredible: they now have offices in New York, Sydney and Auckland and they were recently voted by Creativity Magazine as 2011’s Agency of the year and No. 2 in Ad Age’s 2011 A-List.
Now that we are all his unofficial biographers, I’ll get back to my anecdote, with the peace of mind that we all know what a great opportunity it was to be able to write to Mr. Droga live during the Q&A session and ask him questions about creativity, strategy, business or even the answer to life, the universe and everything.
I joined the live Q&A session quite late, and decided to compensate my delayed arrival by writing the following question (please focus not only on the question in itself but the first letter in each sentence going downwards)
So, if you have, like me, studied Cryptography for dummies you will have deciphered the “Hire Me” message. MI6 style.
The great people at Guardian Media Network thought it was interesting/funny enough to share and kindly tweeted the following:
Some mins later, and with Mr. Droga having answered several questions in detail that were ahead of mine in the meantime, Mr Droga answered my question below, using the same First-letter-of-sentence-to-be-read-downwards code
Mr. Droga lives up to his reputation. Not only did he reply my decoy question with sound advice, he also answered my “code” in a firm (but fair) manner (WHY). Touché David, Touché.
It seems clear that with Mr. Droga, its a No Bollocks approach, like the tagline for latest Beer campaign by Droga 5 (this is probably what most of you were searching for when you started reading the post…sorry for the delay).
To conclude, please check here for the full Q&A session with Droga. Great questions and great answers on topics that anyone working within our industry will be glad to read and discuss.
Thanks for reading.
Take care amigos,
(Post finished to the tune of Mysterious Ways by U2)
