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David Droga welcomes us into his office, a windowed room that – just like an open-plan kitchen – overlooks the multitude of Macs in the agency white loft in Lafayette Street, New York City. Beyond the glasses, the young chefs of the agency sit next to each other. The conversation with David Droga lasts forty minutes.

At twenty-two y/o you were already the boss of an agency, is that true?

I started at eighteen y/o, as soon as I was out of school. You’re probably referring to the fact that I ran my company at twenty-two but it was just a little start-up. Since I was the one who wrote more than everybody else, when there was a vacancy I was asked to run the company. It never crossed my mind to be the head of a company, it just happened.

Was your family already in the business?

I was very far from the world of advertising. I come from a large family. My father was a hotel manager, my mother, who is still a Danish citizen, was an artist and a poet. She no longer paints but she still writes poems. She was an artist and my father was a businessman. Probably I am a mix of  the two of them.

If I ask my son what he wants to be when he grows up, he answers something different every day. Did you already know what you wanted to be when you grow up?

No, I didn’t. I didn’t even know what advertising was. I was a teenager, I did not care, I just wanted to be a writer – I wanted to be a journalist, a screenwriter, a novelist, a reporter, or maybe to write about politics – what I wrote about didn’t matter, I would write just for the sake of writing. A friend of mine suggested I try advertising – agencies were always looking for people who could write and all these things are made in advertising. You don’t have to wait for years to get your book published, the response is immediate. Advertising satisfied my desire to be a writer while giving me immediate gratification.

Today the key word seems to be “storytelling”. Obama recently said that he is not good at telling stories, but I’ve always thought he is a master.

Storytelling is the ability to create emotion around the description of something, no matter what it is about – it’s the art of involving people in your story. You do not just put the facts in a row, the beauty of storytelling lies in combining facts with emotions.

What do you think about Obama’s skills as a storyteller?

I think he just wanted to be humble, he knows he’s a great storyteller and it was this ability that  brought him to the White House. I’m not saying that he personally wrote all the stories, but he certainly is a great speaker. The same story in the mouth of different people can be dampened or can come to life and charm. I haven’t got thousand pages to tell my story as a great novelist has, and I do not even pretend to have the same talent of a writer. I like the restraints of advertising: one page, thirty seconds… I do like the challenge of synthesis.

You are young and you’ve stepped into a field full of accomplished professionals. How did you manage to distinguish yourself?

I didn’t come from a super college but I started from the bottom and at that time the greatest opportunity was TV. I started in a very hip small agency. My first brief was for the Australian main radio station – which was a huge thing – and they gave me what was a crazy budget for those days. The customer told us, “Just create something that make people go ‘fuck’!” That was all he said. Two million dollar budget, that was amazing for an eighteen year old boy. So I started from top to bottom, as opposed as from bottom to top. I was very lucky to be free and play at the highest level from the beginning and I like to think that I learned to swim. I was not worried, I did not even have the time to build my career. I was busy thinking and creating and then success came on its own.

How did you get customers at that time? You said that the most difficult thing is winning customer trust, that once you got it the making of the campaign is the easiest thing.

I did not understand how difficult was to earn customer trust, I was just excited about having this chance. I focused on telling a story, I was just obsessed with it, I didn’t care about attracting clients. Making the business grow wasn’t my first concern, because you will accomplish that if you tell a story that works.

We come from Italy, our Mr. Berlusconi was a great advertising seller. So now everybody in Europe thinks that working in advertising is doing what he did.

I think this is true in Italy as it is in Sweden, Australia – everywhere. That advertising is paternalistic, people in the industry think that just bombarding consumers with a message is enough to make it work. This is because many people have a negative view of advertising. But there is something great in advertising, because we create jobs, we teach things and sometimes we support social change. I believe that many of the best advertising campaigns in UK and in the US do that.

There is a growing trend to download movies and TV series from the Internet, thus removing TV commercials – especially young people do that – but at the same time on occasions such as the Super Bowl people seem more interested in the commercials than in the game.

Yes, of course…

So it seems there is a double standard for evaluating advertising.

This happens in every industry, there is the good and the bad, and this applies to writers as well as to TV movies, fashion – everything. There’s stuff you like and stuff you ignore or dislike. The difference is that when you read a book you didn’t had to read twenty bad books before you get the one you like. On the contrary, in advertising it’s assumed that ads are consumed no matter how they have been made and developed. The advertising industry and the clients have become lazy, they don’t think they must earn the trust of the audience, but now the situation has changed. The possibility to choose what to watch and what to skip set a new challenge in advertising and this is great for me because I have always been a part of the minority who thought you had to earn your chance to work.

That reminds me the Mad Men era, the beginnings of TV, when it was easier to gather attention. But you said that our days are more interesting.

I believe that fifty years ago advertising was more seductive, they were dressed better, they had more fun, they drank a lot, smoked a lot – all the things I’d like to do now.  The job was more linear then. You knew you had to do a thirty seconds commercial and that was it, and people would watch it. Now you have so many options, so many ways to decline your message, so we have to be brave to break the wall of cynicism. I like today’s challenge way better. I firmly believe in the possibility of doing beautiful things in a difficult contest without giving in to nostalgia.

When you work on a campaign do you design it to become viral?

Anything can be viral. I always ask myself how people can interact with what we do, what are the ramifications of an idea, we don’t aim just at making people laugh. Saying something that they didn’t know, make them think of something concerning them, and maybe support a cause they didn’t know. It’s pure communication. Advertising is part of our life, when you dress up in the morning, when you tweet to promote yourself… and so everyone seems to hate advertising until they do not make it for themselves. I believe that advertising plays a key role in changing our society, it does it every time you want to sell something – your home, for example.

You’ve just mentioned Twitter …

I  rarely tweet.

… Once you said that in your work you need much less than Twitter 140 characters.

Well, I think we must be concise and go straight to the point. People do not have time, especially if you interrupt them to get their attention. In everyday life, if someone tells you a story and never comes to the point, you get distracted. Of course if you are selling 80% off BMW cars you don’t need to say anything else, but advertising is about making people trust you, or letting them know something they do not know, and that’s far more difficult. For some, advertising is potentially a manipulation, depending on what you are promoting. We try to advertise things we believe in.

Excuse me for interrupting you. Let’s make some examples, like Microsoft or Coca Cola. Take Coca Cola…

Well, you know, I believe that Coca Cola makes extraordinary things in the world. At the same time they are dealing with problems that parents must rightly face. For example, they are doing lot of things with the problem of water supply all around the world, they have a network that distributes medicines in Africa. But there are brands I would never work for because in my opinion they do not contribute to common well-being of the world. If you’re asked to use your talent to mask something you do not believe in, do not accept the job. We don’t expect everything to be bulletproof but if the intentions are good… what we do is much more than just selling candies, cereals, cars, and drinks.

Does social responsibility play a key role in your campaigns?

I can only speak for myself. But as I’ve said before, we want to go deeper than the surface of our customer, and we strive to obtain more than just a quick sale.

Without mentioning names, did you say “no” to big corporations?

Absolutely.

With big budgets?

Yes, of course. I could not work on things I wouldn’t give to my children. We are an independent agency. We grew quickly thanks to our ethical principles. If we said yes to anyone, that would compromise the relationship with other clients. At the same time I do not want to be a small agency, a “boutique”. I believe we can do great profitable things – but only by doing business in the most ethical manner.

What is a difficult project?

We start from a simple concept, which is the essence of advertising. For example, if we talk about UNICEF and its campaign to bring water where it can’t be accessed (see “Droga5 tap project” on YouTube, ed.), clean tap water is something we take for granted, while in many parts of the world is the most precious thing. So the idea is to create a brand from something that already exists. If we can convince people to pay an extra dollar on their water bill or to donate a virtual bottle of water or to pay for the free water they get in restaurants and 100% of the proceeds go to Unicef, then we will reach a historic goal.

Do you know all of your emplyees?

Well, I know everybody, but I didn’t hire them one by one.

I read that you choose your employees not on the basis of their excellence in advertising, but because they “have something”, because they tell a story.

I look for humanity in them. Here you find talented people, but not one-dimensional. I am looking for people who are not obsessed with advertising, but that are in sync with what is happening. People who live in the ‘real world’, who love our industry, but not only our industry. And we don’t care that much about winning awards.

Are you interested in their political views?

People know that I’m left-wing but I believe that everyone has the right to have their own ideas. I believe that as for the kind of work we do, the place we are, and what we say, many of us in here are liberals and left-wing, but this is not important.

As I’m getting older I become more interested in talking with people who have ideas different from mine.

I agree, I’m not looking for clones of myself. I think it’s rather important to have people with different outlooks working for you. The liberals don’t have a monopoly on doing good.

You have worked for the Obama campaign in 2008.

We worked on a strategic ad in 2008. We worked with Sarah Silverman and we had a definite goal. Now she made another funny ad, only less strategic.

The press says that this is the bloodiest campaign ever. 78% of ads are attack ads, not positive messages. Some journalists, like Frank Rich of New York Magazine, says that negative ads are ok. What is your opinion?

There have always been such ads, and now they are the rule. They are so general: when every commercial is negative you fail to hit your rival. I don’t think this is the bloodiest campaign ever, there have been terrible and shameful campaigns in the past. But what’s lacking in this one – and I am disappointed by both campaigns – is a clear message, something that goes to the heart of what America is. They don’t say clearly what we should believe, they just pull punches.

Hasn’t it become a very ideological campaign? Even when they go about “more/less Washington”, “more/less central power” – it’s all vague, it’s only claims.

Yes, and I also believe that on both parts there is no real intention to hit each other – for example on the ground of religion, because they both have something to hide, but I hope that one of the two candidates, one in particular, will fly higher. I truly hope so. The last time everybody said that there would never be a black president. This time nobody spends hours talking about what it means to be a Mormon. Obama inherited the worst economic situation but people have a short memory. And now everybody thinks that he could have done much more.

What about you, how did it go during these years of recession?

Very good for us, we have grown by 30% every year. We were very lucky. I like to think that it is due to the quality of our work.

Do you plan to be independent forever?

Not as a matter of principle. Should we be part of a bigger picture, I will be open. We have great ambitions. If we can grow faster and do the things we believe in, we may consider this possibility.

Last question. Do you think one can still learn from the work of Bill Bernbach (which our magazine is named after)?

Well, of course, he changed advertising forever. He added genuine emotions to advertising. He turned simple, linear, descriptive stories into exciting stories. If his best commercials would be aired on television today, they would still be the best ones: a combination of simplicity, relevance, humanity, fun, honesty. These principles are still valid today. He opened the way to the entire industry. He is far above all the others in the business.

The interview is over and David Droga starts talking about Italian advertising. He says that it is not as brave as it could be. He tells he has friends who work in the field in Italy, who are frustrated by the situation while clients just sits on their hands. In an attempt to console me, he whispers that in Italy there are so many excellent things that, even if advertising is not one of them, we can be satisfied.