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Right and Left Brain From left to right: Maurice Lévy, Davig Droga, and David Kenny at Droga5 offices in Manhattan.
Related StoriesNowhere is that melding of metrics and imagination more total than in the Global Marketing Navigator, the new Web tool that's currently setting Publicis clients' hearts aflutter. It was developed by Greg Green, a Digitas senior VP and math PhD, who, like Lévy, saw the ad world as a ticket out of a life of technocratic obscurity (in his case, at Pricewaterhouse). The Navigator is an application that simplifies the masses of data generated by a client's marketing program and suggests ways to capitalize on them. Unlike other such diagnostic tools in the marketplace, with their lagging indicators heavy on numbers and graphs, the Navigator allows anyone in the Publicis chain, from the client to the creative team in-house, to see exactly what an ad looks like in the context in which it is running, as well as how it's performing. So a CMO can, for example, see how his display ad looks -- just as a consumer would see it -- on CNN.com, or in The Washington Post, or on Dog Whisperer, or in the pages of Fast Company, and evaluate key metrics across channels such as cost per order, return on investment, and brand impact.
It also shows what his competitors are up to, so he can see the price of certain ad words go up if somebody is bidding for them on Google, or how the creative looks in situ. Like a Web 2.0 Bloomberg terminal for advertising, the site also aggregates news, industry information, RSS, and feeds from DoubleClick, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and ties them to each creative execution.
Armed with such digested, transparent information, Green says, a marketer can tweak a campaign quickly in step with consumer response: "The technology allows us to deploy information to the creative team, who can see how an ad is downloading, how long consumers are spending with it. They can see, for example, that 40% are blowing it up to full screen, that 60% are seeing it in the Web site, etc." Armed with that information, chief creative officers -- such as Digitas's Mark Beeching -- can use those insights to rejigger their ads.
"The data and the creativity play off each other," Beeching says. "For example, topicality can have a huge impact on the success -- or failure -- of a specific creative execution. We're always on the lookout for this in the travel category [where Digitas has hotel and airline clients]." Paris Hilton suddenly appears topless on a Côte d'Azur beach? The Navigator is ready to capitalize: "We dial up a specific execution to make the most of the location," Beeching says. Think banner ads featuring special airfares to Nice. "We're talking not just percentile improvements here, but major shifts in response, from a 10% uplift to even doubling it." Of course, he says, other events can just as quickly wipe out a specific location or celebrity's appeal. "And topicality itself can soon turn to topic fatigue," he says, "so you can never rest."
When Lévy saw the Navigator, he called it "the connective tissue behind the agency of the future." By next year, all the Publicis agencies -- and their clients -- will have access to it. "Our value at the Publicis Groupe is to take the complexity away," Kenny says. "We're not trying to drag these CMOs through the details of what we do. We try to give them a front end and say, 'Here's how you navigate it.' And then really focus on delivering what their consumers need, based on that insight."
And it is in that sense, he says, that "creative is more important in the interactive age than it was before -- because it's on-demand. Our goal is to build creative so good, consumers send it to their friends." Funny, that's what David Droga's dreaming about too.
Even for a guy whose preferred look is Eric Clapton–grizzled, Droga is looking a little scruffy. It's late on a Friday afternoon in early October, and Droga, 39, ensconced in his new offices in Manhattan's East Village, just down the block from Joe Papp's Public Theater, is bone tired. That's not to say he won't be working this weekend, just like he worked the last one, and the one before that. Getting Honeyshed up and running has been a far harder slog than he ever envisioned.
In August 2005, Droga stepped away from one of the big creative jobs in the industry, where he had become the single most awarded creative at Cannes, with 48 Lions and three Grand Prix. He was, he says, spending all his time on planes, shaking hands, putting out fires. But the rewards of the top job were too abstract, he says. He wanted to be back on the ground, not do time as a grinning front man.
So he cornered Lévy at a park in Cannes in June 2005, and told his boss that he wanted an agency of his own, where he could pursue the big digital idea that would eventually become Honeyshed. Lévy listened, and gave the idea his blessing; he also committed to investing in Droga's project. "It's very hard to say no to David," he concedes. Droga5 (David was the fifth boy of seven Droga children) was founded less than a year later.
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