Mumbrella Wrote a Long Obituary for Droga5 Sydney

By Patrick Coffee 

We were surprised when Droga5 opted to close its Sydney office in September, but Australian trade pub Mumbrella saw it all coming.

David Droga was very candid in his statement on the closing, writing that “the Sydney office has floundered over the past few years” and that it “no longer consistently represents the Droga5 brand.”

In a very long story that ran over a week ago (yes, we know), Mumbrella’s Steve Jones spoke to several anonymous now-former staffers to get some hints as to what happened.

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The narrative is pretty clear: Droga5 Sydney always operated in the shadow of its far better-known New York counterpart, and the agency ultimately didn’t practice enough discretion when it came to picking clients. Here are some quotes from an unnamed former “senior creative”:

“What clients want and what will pick up awards are two things you have to balance. But as Droga5 Sydney, to be in the same ball park as the NY guys, you had to make decisions where other people may tread more carefully. Basically you had to produce a style of work that would perform well at awards shows as opposed to thinking ‘what is the single best thing I could do for my client.’ The number one motivation became ‘how can we live up to the Droga5 name.'”

In other words, Sydney wanted to do the kind of edgy stuff that wins headlines for Droga5 New York but ignored some basics in the process, chief among them making money.

From a senior strategist:

“New York has done some edgy stuff, of course it has, but the reality is that most of the work was standard work for the likes of Prudential, Diet Coke and cereal brands. When you look at what pays the bills, what keeps the doors open, it’s not fake spray painting Air Force One [a reference to a viral 2006 campaign for fashion designer Marc Ecko which put Droga NY on the map], it’s the bread and butter stuff which Droga doesn’t seek publicity for.”

Jones also writes that, while the office hired plenty of senior management talent, that trend didn’t apply to the lower levels of the organization. So they won plenty of accounts but couldn’t quite deliver on the work itself. One ex-planner says that clients experimented with Droga Sydney before moving their business to other shops, writing, “They grew up through the process of working with Droga and then shot Droga.”

Other sources argue the same point, saying that Sydney did great work until other local agencies started to catch up.

Jones even got a former Woolworth’s marketer to tell him that the process of working with the retail giant “destroyed the culture of Droga” and call the office “naive” for accepting the business in the first place while also blaming Woolworth’s for thinking that a new agency could solve its myriad problems.

Here’s another great line:

“Clients go from agency to agency, they get shit work and haven’t figured out they are the cause of it.”

Other creatives, however, say the agency itself is the only party behind that mediocre work.

There’s a lot more in the piece, including some very harsh takes on a couple of now-former senior executives and sharp disagreements about who, exactly, was responsible for the office’s closing. You should read the whole thing when you have time.

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