In the advertising business, certain agencies have a way of scattering their alumni across the industry like seeds from a particularly fertile dandelion. Chiat/Day did it in the 1980s. Wieden+Kennedy has done it for decades. And now, by several accounts, Droga5 appears to be having its own diaspora moment.
The agency founded by David Droga in 2006 — which became part of the Accenture Song empire in 2019 — has emerged as a common thread connecting many of the boutique shops that are currently attracting attention and, more to the point, attracting clients. It is the sort of pattern that becomes visible only when you step back far enough to see the whole map.
This is not, of course, an accident. (What, you were expecting it to be a coincidence?) Agencies that prize a certain kind of creative ambition tend to attract people who share that ambition, and those people tend to leave eventually, as people do, and start things of their own. The cycle is as old as the business itself, though the names on the doors change every generation or so.
What makes the Droga5 lineage notable is its timing. The agency rose to prominence during a period when the traditional holding company model was beginning to show strain, and its alumni are now opening shops during a period when that strain has become impossible to ignore. Clients who once would have hired a large networked agency are increasingly willing to consider smaller alternatives — provided those alternatives come with credible pedigrees.
Whether this represents a genuine shift in how the industry organizes itself, or simply the latest turn of a wheel that has been turning since Bill Bernbach's protégés started leaving Doyle Dane Bernbach in the 1960s, remains to be seen. The dandelion, after all, does not ask where its seeds will land.
Original story published in adage.com: "Behind Droga5's diaspora—and why it's not a 'coincidence' - Ad Age"