Droga5 New York’s Top 5 Cannes Contenders

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New Yourk Times_Truth.jpgFor the past decade Droga5 New York has been one of the hottest agencies at the important global award shows.

If you’re wondering what they have in store for this year’s Cannes Lions here are their Top 5 prospects for 2017.

In the wake of a new presidential era and an unprecedented time when people are forced to question where they get their news from, The New York Times tapped Droga5 to help ensure that the Gray Lady would stand out as the leader in quality journalism, as well as drive a spike in subscriptions. “The Truth Is Hard” launched during the 2017 Academy Awards, garnered over 15 million views online and across social media and was even parodied by Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert.

MailChimp’s first major marketing campaign, “Did You Mean MailChimp?”, began slowly rolling out in January 2017, but it is not what you might expect from an established brand looking to say “Hello” and introduce itself to a new audience. Instead of the expected brand campaign, the company created an ecosystem of additive, artful and playful experiences. MailChimp is the world’s leading marketing platform. Fifteen million customers, from small e-commerce businesses to major online retailers, use MailChimp to express themselves to the world and connect the right people with the right message, at the right time. As a company that has built itself on enabling small businesses to grow without compromise, the new campaign shows that MailChimp practices what it preaches: Being creative and true to yourself is good for business. For MailChimp, that meant having fun with its name in as many creative ways as possible, drawing on inspiration from its 2014 audio ad, popularized by cult podcast series Serial, in which people mispronounced MailChimp, ending with the now infamous “MailKimp?”

For over seventy years, Johnsonville has done things its own way: the Johnsonville Way. It’s a way that puts members (their employees) first and empowers them to have a stake in this family-owned sausage business. So in 2016, Droga5 took that company mentality to the next level by asking Johnsonville members to come up with the company’s television commercials. What started with a number of interviews in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, ended with a car chase, a haunted house and a man talking to his animal friends in the forest. In the second year of work, we once again traveled to Sheboygan Falls and interviewed close to a hundred Johnsonville members. This time, the brief was commercial ideas to launch the brand’s new, flame-grilled chicken product and to advertise it’s classic smoked rope sausage. What we ended up with was a 70s game show where contestants bid “insanely high” on Johnsonville Smoked Sausage, and a Johnsonville member’s glam rock tribute to Johnsonville’s flame-grilled chicken. As it turns out, the best people for coming up with sausage commercials are the people who actually make the sausage.

Coming off 2015’s championship-winning, history-making MVP season, nobody realized just how much better Stephen Curry would be in 2015-2016. Not only did he shatter his own three-point record, but according to ESPN and The New York Times, he literally changed the game of basketball – and won his second MVP with the NBA’s first-ever unanimous decision. We were all caught a little off-guard, even the video game developers of NBA 2K16, as by mid-season, Curry was clearly out-performing his video-game self. So we convinced the developers to actually raise video-game Curry’s ratings for all 7 million weekly global players, in celebration of Curry’s winning the MVP. For 30 hours, he became the greatest shooter in NBA 2K’s 16-year history, and Curry fans across the world played with MVP Curry’s true skills for the very first time.

To launch the new Chase Ink Business Preferred card, we wanted to prove how valuable the card’s reward points are for business owners when invested back into their business. So we partnered with Mark Isreal, owner of New York City-based Doughnut Plant, with the ambitious goal of using 80,000 points from Mark’s Chase Ink card to create the next food craze. Using ingredients and equipment purchased with points, Mark created the Ripple-a doughnut that went viral around the world. It was featured on TV, food blogs, and social media, and the food craze continues to grow as Doughnut Plant releases new flavor combinations. We proved the value of points by creating a real world product with the same number of points you get when you sign up for the card. And we challenged business owners everywhere to create the next big thing for their business using points from their Chase Ink card.