The New Droga5: Cultural Influence, brand capital and a side of the unexpected

If Droga5’s 2025 was about wiring the machine together, 2026 is about switching it on, top of the dial, to write the next chapter for what creative agencies can become.

This isn’t a story about a merger. It’s a story about belief. About what creative agencies are for in the age of AI efficiency, performance marketing and boardroom scepticism. As Droga5 London enters its first full year as a newly configured force — larger, louder, and newly aligned — its leadership team is staking out a clear position: brand is not just decoration. It is growth capital. Cultural influence is not an aesthetic by-product; it is commercial leverage.

Last year’s merger between Accenture Song’s creative business and its sibling creative hot shop Droga5 necessitated some real rewiring, cultural stitching, leadership resets. This year the crew is assembled, ambition is set and the results are coming in.

On paper, the change is obvious. Headcount has more than doubled. Revenue has grown with it. But the real wins go deeper: creative firepower, strategic super-intelligence, first class brand thinking, design strength, social symbiosis. “One plus one equals three,” CEO Bill Scott says of the rebooted business. “Now this year has got to be about the wins and the work, about manifesting the best possible version of ourselves in terms of creativity and the growth that we drive.”

But, as the cliché goes, this is all evolution — but on steroids. “This is the third chapter,” Scott says. “And it feels very, very different from the previous two. We're the biggest we've ever been in terms of people, revenue and opportunity. And I think we're probably the best defined we've been as a network. With Mark [Green, the global CEO of Droga5] coming in and new global leadership, the business feels sharper.”

That sharpness has already been recognised globally: Droga5 has just been named Ad Age’s Network of the Year — a signal that the ambition and momentum are translating into industry-leading work at scale.

We joined the big Accenture family in 2019, and I think we're now much more confident and articulate in how we show up as part of the whole — still what Droga5 stands for, but a very different business from the previous two chapters. For me, personally, that's really exciting; this is something fresh and different.”

CCO Tara Ford, who took a “big leap of faith” crossing over last summer from Droga5 in Australia, is ready to up the pace. “I want to evidence what we’re talking about. I want to make it. I want proof out there.” For Ford, the ambition is simple: “I want the work to be surprising. In whatever form that takes; the story that’s told, the way it unfolds or the shape it takes. That’s what gets me excited.”

A clear vision

In a market currently defined by caution, that kind of creative appetite feels refreshing. “Don’t we all want something that makes you think or feel differently? A bit more of that would be good.”

Ford is clear that the London industry has the ingredients. “There’s incredible talent here. Incredible access to people across all sorts of creative fields. But the mood is a bit down.” The antidote, she believes, is not rhetoric but proof. “If you see a great piece of work out there, it doesn’t matter where it comes from — that’s energising. And hopefully marketers see that and think, I want some of that.”

There is, inevitably, a weight of expectation. Droga5 has historically been one of the market’s disruptive forces. Ford doesn’t shirk that. “Yeah, sure,” she says of the responsibility. “But it’s collective. It’s about attracting the right clients, making them excited, getting the right briefs — and then attacking that brief in the right way.” And awards? “They’ll come out of great work,” she says firmly. “I don’t like it when people make work purely for awards. The most gratifying thing is solving a big gnarly business problem and doing great work that works.”

And while Ford has an optimism about creativity in London that some of her own home-grown peers are struggling to find, she’s also clear that there’s room for change: “I'm interested in building something that's quite different creatively. For example, I’ve been hiring from Rethink in Canada and Mischief in New York and bringing new talent here that comes from different places, with different thinking and different ways of coming at things. I want to do more of that.”

For CSO Will Hodge, the shift is both personal and structural. “I feel full-powered now,” he says. “Coming into Droga5 has stripped away a lot of the noise. The standards are exceptionally high and I love that.” This ambition goes beyond creative energy. “My agenda is simple: to close the gap between cultural influence and enterprise value. Brand and an obsession about what people want and need shouldn’t sit at the edge of the business, it should shape what the business chooses to become. Clarity of meaning and value is an essential commercial advantage. Brands can be the organising logic that sharpens the choices businesses need to make, before then deciding how to exert their influence in culture.”

There’s also a sense that the agency is no longer reacting to change but driving it. “So many people feel like they’re waiting for the wave of disruption to crash over their heads,” Hodge says. “I’ve got a real sense that we can be a force that shapes disruption.” That confidence matters more than ever in client rooms if the agency is to fully realise the united power of commerce and creativity to drive growth for its clients. For Droga5, cultural influence and business influence are not parallel tracks; they are two sides of the same equation, told properly.

Strategy’s role, then, is not to smother creativity in system, but to surface that latent energy. “It’s about having Droga5 confidence inside a client,” Hodge says. “Yes, you need the commercial rigour. Yes, you need to understand the human condition. But unless you’ve got a really simple, exciting idea, you’re never going to be as creative as you want to be.”

Driving the growth agenda

And this is the point: what Droga5 is articulating isn’t a tweak. It’s a thesis.

The leadership team is clear that too much of the industry’s transformation conversation has drifted into operational hygiene: efficient, yes. Expansive, no.

“Often we get called in to end-to-end transformations,” says Scott. “A big part of that is operational efficiency — headcount remodelling, cost reduction, AI enablement. But we’re helping to drive the growth agenda. Working with clients to use their brand as the intelligence layer that leads and shapes the business reinvention”.

This is where the language sharpens. Internally, the team are looking at how brand contribution might be understood “from a balance sheet perspective”. Conversations with external commercial valuation partners point to a bigger ambition: to explore commercial constructs that reflect brand as enterprise value — not just campaign output.

Hodge doesn’t mince words about the perception they’re pushing against. “Brand can sometimes be seen as a bit of a bad word in the boardroom. It’s expensive. It used to be the TV ad you pressed play on. Now, if they think it’s anything, they might think it’s fluffy money that you don’t see a return on.” Droga5’s counter is succinct: “We talk about brand as growth capital.”

That framing matters because it changes who is buying. “When you start to get into the business side,” Hodge says, “the CEO is a buyer. They’re buying higher calibre, high-power thinking not a CMO trying to fit something in at the edge of a bigger contract.” This shift is already visible in recent wins. At the end of last year, global ticketing platform AXS appointed Droga5 London as its worldwide strategic and creative partner — with a mandate to shape a new global brand platform as the business scales.

For Scott, who’s notched up a decade at the agency, this is the sort of thinking and positioning that is not only the natural next step for the rebooted Droga5, it’s a necessary future-proofing for a business in the creative space. “I think doing work that spans business influence and trading all the way through to customer experience — this is where Droga5 can really stand apart. There are no easy wins out there to make that happen. But that's where we should be. That's how we should be talked about, and we can only deliver on our ambition if we’re able to build the trust of our clients and stand shoulder to shoulder with them amidst all the swirl and change”. In a market crowded with incrementalism, that joined-up ambition feels less like positioning and more like leadership.

For an agency that has spent a year rebuilding its foundations, this next chapter is going to be less about structure and more about real impact.

And, if Ford has her way, a few surprises too.