‘Wombat of Wall Street’: The ad guru selling Australia to the world
By Calum Jaspan
There must be something in the water in Perisher Valley, a small ski resort in the Snowy Mountains, and the unlikely location for producing arguably the world’s most famous ad man.
He may not be a household name like other Australian A-listers – Margot Robbie or Hugh Jackman – but David Droga traverses the advertising and business worlds at the helm of creative consulting giant Accenture Song.
‘I don’t want us just to be globally seen as the cheeky chappies or the sort of the great sidekicks.’
Having created ads for The New York Times, Barack Obama, Puma and The White House – and at 56 being the most awarded creative in the history of the advertising industry’s top prize the Cannes Lions – Droga is getting ready to sell Australia to the world.
It’s a job seemingly tailor-made for a man who once joked in a 60 Minutes profile he was the “Dingo of Wall Street”.
“I was just trying to be funny, it was a throwaway joke [...] I’d rather call myself the Wombat of Wall Street,” he says, speaking to this masthead on a late-summer evening in New York.
Droga, like many creative Australians, left our shores at a young age to fulfil his potential. And as someone who has spent most of his adult life outside the country, he has a complex, critical and constructive view of the country.
‘Creativity isn’t just the privilege of those that got the highest HSC or have links to who knows who or whatever.’
David Droga
“I don’t want us just to be globally seen as the cheeky chappies or the sort of the great sidekicks,” he says.
“We’ve got a young country. So being a young country means you’re not as confident. We’ve got the confidence of a 15-year-old boy, where you’ve got a sort of bravado and your cockiness, but there’s a bit of insecurity behind that.”
Spoiled by its geography and a bounty of mineral wealth, Australia has been fortunate enough to bypass the friction and adversity that often forges the creative soul of a nation. His vision of Australia is one of a more ambitious nation that’s more empowered, that takes its future by the scruff of the neck, “as opposed to sort of just dig it out of the ground”.
He thinks Australia should strive to become an innovation hub, where creative opportunity is democratised.
“Creativity isn’t just the privilege of those that got the highest HSC or have links to who knows who or whatever,” he says.
Droga’s determined yet laid-back candour is the antithesis of the corporate jargon-obsessed consultants the ad world is renowned for. “One of the superpowers I have is ability to dumb things down and simplify things,” he says, from the 67th floor of his Manhattan office.
That superpower, his self-assuredness and his view of Australia will be vital in the pitch to the world after his eponymous agency Droga5, Australian-based The Monkeys and Accenture Song won the creative and digital account for Tourism Australia after a 10-month, cross-continental process last month.
It’s some responsibility, and to an extent shapes how Australia is viewed, with famous ads such as Paul Hogan’s “Shrimp on the Barbie” spot of 1984, and Lara Bingle’s derided “Where the bloody hell are you” several decades later coming before.
The new team has to carry on the “Come and Say G’Day” platform debuted in 2022, fronted by a Rose Byrne-voiced cartoon kangaroo, “Ruby”. The initial campaign was considered a safe play by some, yet after spending more than $125 million, the Australian government deemed it a success with arrivals boosted.
But when it comes to Droga5 or The Monkeys, you don’t get “safe”.
“I’m not that petty or insecure where I’m like ‘oh my goodness, I’m inheriting something that I think is going to hold us back’. It’s early days for that construct, and I’m arrogant enough to think that we can do something wonderful with it. There was some good thinking in there,” he says.
Much of creativity is taking an existing thing and reinterpreting, or misinterpreting it, he says.
“I am so blatantly biased towards getting it right for Australia. They know that we put the best team, and Australians all over the world on it.
“I wasn’t judging it as this is an account we have to win because of the economics, I was like we have to win this account, so I can show my face in Australia and make sure that Australia gets the stage that it deserves.”
He has already had one bite of the apple too, creating a Dundee, a spoofed sequel to Crocodile Dundee starring Chris Hemsworth and Danny McBride for those watching the Superbowl in 2018. Like much of his work, it was considered controversial, but a success.
The youngest of five brothers, Droga was appointed executive creative director at the legendary Saatchi & Saatchi’s Singapore office at 27, soon after moving to London, and he hasn’t looked back, eventually quitting the top creative post at French giant Publicis to set up Droga5 in his wife’s native New York in 2006.
A viral video for edgy clothing brand Ecko, showing a team spray-painting Air Force One put the agency on the map. And he eventually ended up at the top of the advertising ladder when Droga5 was bought by Accenture for almost $US500 million ($763 million) in 2019.
Onlookers suggest the price was inflated just to get Droga through the door. In 2021, he was made global chief executive of Accenture Song, armed with some of the world’s hottest independent creative agencies, like his own, and The Monkeys.
“There is a massive complexity in a lot of businesses, and a lot of people get paralysed by that, and they make very mediocre decisions, or they don’t make decisions,” Droga says.
“I’ve always been confident in making a decision because it’s what moves us forward. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but I’ll stand behind it whether I am right or wrong, and I’ll take responsibility if I’m not. I’m a big believer in sprinting forward or falling forward. But moving forward.”
The word creativity didn’t really mean anything at the sports-oriented boarding school he attended in Sydney, and Droga questions whether Australia has had the systems to place the spotlight on, and give oxygen to, creativity.
This is exemplified through the Sydney Opera House, he says, a beacon of creativity lighting its way against the odds. Last year, The Monkeys created a film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Opera House, delivered through a performance by Tim Minchin. In June, it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, the top gong at the awards show.
“The Opera House is a homage to that. The [film] is a homage to that. Most people didn’t want that to happen. They didn’t understand that, they like conformity, they like things to be familiar. Familiarity is safe, and the middle is safe.”
That’s the thing about Droga, he’s constantly taking a perspective other people can’t see, says marketing consultant and industry commentator Darren Woolley.
“Whether it’s a brand, cause, or political perspective, he makes you go ‘shit I hadn’t thought about that’, and he’s found a way of doing that on a much bigger stage than just Australia,” Woolley says.
While Australia’s public familiarity with advertising may be framed through a Gruen-based lens, people on the street in New York know who Droga5 is, according to Mark Green, co-founder of the Monkeys and Song boss in Australia and New Zealand.
“It’s a famous brand, and he’s a, he’s the name on the door.”
Green says locally we look to find flaws and holes in the stories of people like Droga, such is Australia’s tall poppy syndrome.
“Sometimes we should build statues to these people because they’re the kind of people we should all be looking up to and admire as success stories.”
In his office, Droga keeps just two of the hundreds, or thousands, of awards he has won across his career. The student of the year prize he won, aged 18 from the AWARD Advertising school in Australia, and the lifetime achievement he was presented in Cannes in 2017, the youngest to ever receive it at 49.
It will be handy to have feet on the ground in the fruitful American market. Even better those feet belong to a fiercely proud Australian.
“I’ve become so annoying to all my non-Australian friends because I’m on this rampage about the Olympics,” Droga says. “I even created an algorithm, which I put in all the medal tallies and everything so it was displayed per capita. I was ready to show it to all my friends, and it came out and f--ing New Zealand was one.”
And while he has previously joked about wanting to become Australia’s next prime minister, it would take a lot to tear him away from New York and return home, with four children firmly rooted down.
“I think that was half in jest and half in seriousness. What I meant by that, is I would go back if I could have a material impact on something on scale. If I feel like I could help.”
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