Has there been a more powerful and influential person in advertising or marketing services than David Droga for the last decade?
His retirement from Accenture Song this week has elicited a host of retrospectives on the career of the last ‘MadMan’.
I’ve never met him, but I did once feel his impact.
In the mid 1990’s I was working in Singapore as a planner in Asia’s best creative ad agency of that time, Batey Ads. Inventor of the Singapore Girl amongst other things.
Batey’s creative winning streak in Asia had already lasted about a 20 years.
The eponymous Iain Batey was a collector and shuffler of local and expat talent whose output, driven by his restless perfectionism, won clients and awards all over the world against the best agencies anywhere.
So imagine our surprise when in about 1996 we started to lose pitches to the local office of Saatch & Saatchi.
And not because of connections or budget, but on strategy and creative. Losing Visa really stung. It still rankles.
Turns out David Droga had arrived as their Executive Creative Director.
Imagine being able to personally oversee creative excellence of that level and then years later sell your own agency twice (once for nearly half a billion dollars) and then transform and run a consultancy of $19 billion in revenue – that’s more than the whole of Omnicom, the biggest of the marketing service groups.
My answer to my own question is obviously NO!
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