David Droga told a room of Australian agency leaders that the holding company model is melting and creatives need to stop being nostalgic for it.
The Accenture vice chair - speaking at an AWARD event days after WPP declared itself in the "post-holding-company era" - described the traditional agency network as "a waiting game over whose iceberg melts first." He said the business model that built the industry is broken, but the demand for creative thinking has never been higher.
"I don't think the world needs new agencies as in the past," Droga said. "The business model of the industry is broken, or changed. But the necessity of the role we play - the creative thinker - is more in demand and more needed now."
The holding company problem
Droga's diagnosis of holding companies was direct. He argued they make their money on media and give creative work away to win accounts - "immediately telling clients creative isn't worth paying for" - while tech companies work out how to disrupt the media supply chain that holding companies depend on. "When that happens, it's going to take the core out of these holding companies," he said.
But he also made a case for what survives. There will always need to be a layer between platforms - who hold all the power - and brands. "Clients know the platforms don't have their best interests at heart. There needs to be someone who understands consumers, understands strategy, has taste, and is beholden to the client and the consumer. That is always going to be needed. It's just a question of what it looks like," he said.
What it won't look like, he said, is 850 people in a New York office - the scale Droga5 reached before the Accenture acquisition. The new independents he advises in the US need seats across the C-suite, compensation tied to outcomes, and relationships that touch more than the marketing line.
Creatives should run the companies, not just departments
Droga spent his Accenture Song years inside Fortune 500 boardrooms and returned with a pointed observation. "They are greater advocates of creative people than our own industry is now," he said. "Just think about that. That is devastating and shocking - that they realise the value of creative thinkers and strategy and taste, and they're trying to collect them, more than our industry itself, which is playing an arms-race game chasing media, coupons and discount fees."
His answer was structural. Only three to four per cent of American board directors have a creative, design or product background. So his work at Accenture included partnerships with Fast Company and Harvard Business School to create tracks that land creative people on boards and in C-suites.
"I don't want creatives running a department. I want them running the companies," he said. "Not every creative - some are better off left in the sandpit with mittens on. But there are creatives who would be awesome CEOs and chief strategy officers, and they're either not given the opportunity, or they're intimidated out of having the aspiration."
On AI: "When everything is best practice, nothing is"
Droga's take on AI focused on one risk: sameness. "Everyone's caught up in the party trick - I can do what's mediocre, faster and cheaper. Everything looks the same. Very soon we'll realise nothing is different," he said. "When everything is best practice, nothing is."
Most creativity, he argued, isn't good - most advertising, music, journalism and architecture is mediocre, produced by compromise and research. "If you raise the floor, you also raise the ceiling. But the very top of everything - the irrational, illogical, emotional, context-based - that's where the magic happens. That's what we bring," he said.
He warned that AI is built around certainty and predictability. "Everything great about humans is our flaws and our bugs. Our misinterpretations, our heartbreak, our audacity, our irreverence - all that quirky stuff that makes us who we are. When you harness that instead of burying it, we're a powerful commodity."
His advice to students and young creatives: don't think about breaking into the industry. Think about breaking it. "People are busy trying to restore the industry as it was," he said. "Stop restoring. Start rebuilding."
Why this matters for creatives
Droga drove the same Accenture's division from $12 billion to $20 billion. He did not graduate college. His argument is that the career path for a creative director should not top out at creative director. If you want a seat at the table, he said, you need to compensate to outcomes, expand beyond making ads, and stop being "nostalgic for the things that got us where we are." The alternative is watching other industries collect the creative talent the advertising industry is too busy discounting to hire.
Your membership also unlocks:
