David Droga.
The name Droga5 has more to do with missing underwear than any concept governing the principles of marketing.
David Droga, the founder of advertising agency Droga5 and now global CEO of Accenture Song, was the fifth of six children who grew up in Perisher, NSW.
His mother sewed “Droga 5” labels and his clothes to mark that this was the fifth Droga child and that his underwear was not to be mixed up with one of his brothers.
“I had this idyllic childhood in the mountains with my five siblings and I was the fifth son,” he told the AFR Business Summit in Sydney.
“The nearest high school was two hours away so we were shipped off to boarding school and Droga 5 was my laundry tag on my clothes.
“I would tell people in the beginning: It's the five principles of communication.
“But it's actually just so my brothers didn't take my undies.”
And when he did register Droga5, he also did one each for Droga1-6.
“I own the domain, so I always threaten them, if they annoy me, I'm going to put really horrible content on.”
Droga, asked at the AFR Summit about AI, said most are using it to create content much faster.
“They can personalise things much faster," he said.
“I'm not sure you have this down here yet but we’re synthetic personas is another thing that we're seeing a lot of from clients.
“Every type of demographic there is you can create with AI now, so you can get real time results and test new products, test marketing campaigns.
“You can test all these different things, and it's been used in government, where you get results in hours, as opposed to four to five months.
“In the last election, we invested in a company which is unbelievable. The three founders -- two of them are 19, and one of them is 16 -- they'd already raised about $30 million. They predicted within 99.96%, basically almost 100% ,of every result in the last election. It's unbelievable.”
However, while many see AI as a catch all it's not the only thing
“It's still a tool,” he said. “It's what you do with (it).
“I was reading an article last week .. a big marketing campaign from the fashion brand that I think spent $600,000 to make a TV collection.
“Probably took two months, and they replicated that shot for shot in an hour for $50 bucks. That is amazing. Now what wasn't mentioned is both of them were shit.
“You can still make things and create things, but it's still what you do. Now you can fail faster. So even creating bad things, it's better to learn faster.
“AI is not going to eviscerate and erase the need for humans and thinkers and creative designers and strategies and insights and all those things.
“It's going to replace the media in the middle across the swath of things.
“Not all creativity jobs are worth saving. I still believe everyone should have the right to have a job, and creativity should still be one of the great natural resources. But that mediocre middle that exists in the world. It exists in advertising design, existing journalism exists in architecture, entertainment, that kind of stuff. There's a formulaic middle.”
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