If Droga5’s continued fruitful collaboration with The New York Times has posed challenges to the ad agency across the years – like, how do you capture the feeling of a time? How do you represent its subscribers and journalists? And how do you visualise its entire spectrum of content? – then, you can imagine our predicament. Creative directors Toby Treyer-Evans and Laurie Howell’s eye-opening talk at this month’s event feels impossible to summarise in a quick round-up. But as the pair broke down its incredible array of campaign concepts for the Times in the talk’s quick runtime, we’ll give a summary our best shot.
From the off, Toby and Laurie showed us how Droga5 has used type on its campaigns to create a “visual poem” – i.e. creating a voice with no audio through typing words – and to make a “tennis rally through history”. The ad agency has also figured out how to reflect not just a subscriber but a whole life using headlines from The New York Times in the film campaign Independent Journalism for an Independent Life. Digging into other fascinating concepts like how to depict the “the symbiotic relationship between the person and the reader”, and create a portrait by painting people’s minds, Toby and Laurie proved that the agency’s work with the paper is about more than just one concept; it’s a rich tapestry of things, just like the publication itself.