Why adman David Droga finds most advertising ‘formulaic’ and poor

afr.com:

The old marketing and advertising sectors face a reckoning, says high-profile Australian advertising boss David Droga. A lot of the work “is shit”, “formulaic”, and adheres to what he describes as a “disruption model”.

“It’s ‘I’m going to just interrupt whatever, wherever you are, whether I’m online or driving down the street, my job is to just get your attention at any cost’,” Mr Droga says. “The world sees marketing as just the attention side of things, shouting and disruption. And what doesn’t help is the majority of marketing is shit. I mean, it really is, let’s be honest. The death of our industry was the lazy and formulaic nature of what we did.”

David Droga, chief executive officer of Accenture Song.  Louie Douvis

Mr Droga, chief executive of Accenture Song, the digital agency division of consultancy firm Accenture, has earned the right to be critical. He is the most awarded creative advertising brain – think Mad Men – in the world. That $36 million Tourism Australia ad with Chris Hemsworth that looked like a Crocodile Dundee sequel trailer? He personally pitched that idea.

He also worked on campaign ads for Barack Obama in 2008, as well as a 2017 campaign for the New York Times that drew the ire of Donald Trump. He is also the youngest person inducted into the Cannes global hall of fame.

Mr Droga now leads Song, which reported $US18 billion ($28 billion) in revenue last year, making it the biggest digital agency in the world. If it were an Australian company, it’d be third in revenue only to BHP and Woolworths.

And so, he has views – and he starts with ad blockers. “People invented technology to avoid what we created. Think about that. People created technology to try and steal your content [from behind