Droga5

0:00 Okay, good evening. Thanks for having us. My name is Laurie. And I'm Tommy. And we're the ECDs at Droga 5 in New York. We've been working together for about 15 years. But for the last four or five years we've been creative directors on The New York Times, leading their brand advertising. We're going to talk a little bit about some new work that has just come out. And we're going to talk about some of the threads that have led up to that over the last few years. And hopefully give you a bit of an insight into our process. Okay, cool.

0:41 So we began working, Droga 5 began working with The New York Times. And the world was a little bit different.

0:46 I think we all remember this tweet or tweets like it. There was a new administration in the US. Culture had swung hugely. This idea of fake news had just been coined. And there was this immediate threat to journalism or independent journalism as we know it. So with this as the backdrop, we looked to make a simple statement that had a bit of immediate attention in it. One that reaffirmed the values of The New York Times. And this is when the truth campaign began, around 2016.

1:22 So the idea was really simple. But when Toby and I jumped in, we wanted to find ways to evolve it and ultimately find a way of making work that shows why journalism is worth paying for in the world today. We decided that the best way to do that was to do it with the truth itself. And that's a really difficult thing. The truth means facts. The things that journalists go out there in the world and collect. Images, film, documents.

1:53 So we had to kind of find a creative way of telling stories to create compelling advertising, making work that still entertains, that provokes you, shocks you, moves you. But in a way that didn't break the same journalistic standards of The New York Times. And that's not an easy thing in advertising because I think a lot of our weapons are embellishment, exaggeration, metaphor, analogy. And so we had to find a different way of doing that.

2:21 So we started with the main weapon of The New York Times. And that is words and type. We noticed that the printed word is this direct connection between the journalists. What they witness in the world and what you read. It's a record of what happened. It's indelible.

2:39 It's this really direct thing. And we were interested in how we could use this as like a distinct element in our advertising. Both visually but also as a storytelling device. It was really helpful because it was immediately recognizable as The New York Times, The New York Times Cheltenham specifically. And we were kind of really interested in the way the words moved, their personality, the shape, the weight, whether they edited themselves, whether we could kind of convey a human quality to them and bring you closer to the journalist who was putting them down ultimately in the newspaper that you read or online. So all of that kind of work and investigation led to the first piece or the first campaign that we did in 2018 called The Truth Is Worth It.

3:25 We had this idea. We thought, what if journalists thought in headlines as they moved through the world? Could we see them kind of develop in front of our eyes and use them rewriting as a kind of visual storytelling thread, something that looked immediately like The New York Times but led you to a single headline.

3:44 But it was designed to show you everything that went into a New York Times article and it allowed us to talk about really interesting subjects that were really pertinent at the time. Like, you know, there was an ISIS investigation, immigration in the US, climate change, and we dived into Trump's taxes too.

4:00 So we did this campaign and we started to establish the way we were using type.

4:05 So we wondered if we could use type to create a tennis rally through history to kind of show our commitment to gender reporting over the years since the 1950s or even earlier in a campaign called The Truth Has a Voice. We wondered if we could reflect life and the connection to our journalism during the huge change in 2021. We wondered if we could use type and image in a different way and almost make a visual poem. We tried to make it rhyme using no voice, just using the way that type arrives and removes itself from the screen and the way that the cadence of the images, we wanted this to put a voice inside your head that made you feel what was going on, but ultimately made you realize why you should be checking in with The New York Times.

4:53 It's almost like a guide through this time of huge change and that campaign was called Life Needs Truth. Then we just continued to develop this thought and we wondered if we could reduce the whole thing to just one word, that little word by that you kind of see next to every single journalist. We wanted to see if we could use that as a thread through a campaign to bring you close to them as people, that The New York Times has like 1,800 different human beings out in the world trying to pursue the truth to bring it back for you. We really wanted to try and humanize that, kind of deinstitutionalize the paper, and we tried to do that through a single little word that changed in font with the different journalists as you move through the film and that was a piece called The Truth Takes a Journalist.

5:39 And then along came 2022 and the world had changed again and we wanted to do a new campaign that would kind of reflect where we are in the world right now. So after a lot of discussion with The Times and our team, we wanted to see if we could find a way to kind of reflect the subscriber or the reader. And when you first think about that, it's kind of every creative nightmare really, trying to play back yourselves or depict your life in a kind of very cheesy way.

6:17 That's the first thing that comes to your head. But luckily for us, The New York Times has actually a really interesting, diverse group of kind of independent souls who are living these independent lives. And so we wanted to kind of see if we could kind of reflect these independent souls in a way that kind of built on the equity of the brand and the design and the voice that we've been building for the last couple of years, but do it in a way that kind of felt really fresh and hopefully disruptive.

6:51 So we first of all have this idea of trying to kind of build or paint a portrait of the reader. But rather than celebrating what they look like, we thought it would be quite interesting to celebrate their minds or their thinking or their interests and their hobbies and do it through the lens of New York Times journalism. We really believed in the idea that you are what you read, and we loved the idea that you can know so much about someone just from kind of understanding what they read or the things they're interested in.

7:27 And in this case, the sort of journalism that you would read actually reflects who you are as a person and informs who you are as a person. And it kind of works vice versa as well. There's sort of symbiotic relationship between the reader and the journalist.

7:44 So we set about figuring out how these kind of portraits could work. And we loved the idea that we could build these portraits from the headlines that they've read and loved. But rather than doing it one at a time, we thought it would be quite interesting to actually fill the screen with it.

8:03 So you've got lots and lots of really interesting reader portraits, which kind of hopefully reflect who they are but feel very distinct. And initially we thought from a visual point of view this felt really different, really interesting, engaging. If you saw this on TV it's something you haven't really seen before. So we kind of gravitated towards that idea.

8:26 And then from there, we developed into this idea of kind of filling a canvas with a life. And so whether it be on a mobile phone or out home poster or TV screen or even cinema screen, whatever the format or whatever the canvas, just like a painting, we can try and fill it with a life. And so that was sort of the starting point of this idea. So kind of from there we had this text block as a good starting point.

8:58 We felt it said a lot about who the reader was. It kind of told, it painted a picture of what they were interested in and who they were. And it also was a really nice meeting point of the journalist and the reader. It described who they were through the headlines that they've read.

9:15 But we felt like words weren't enough and we wanted to develop multiple, kind of, different elements to kind of bring these people to life a bit more and talk about their relationship with journalism.

9:27 So the second thing we did was combined it with journalistic images and artefacts from the articles themselves. And we wanted these to be static and on-white with a lot of white border around them. Because we felt like this felt like it was a direct lift from the journalism itself. And it had to be really clear that this was journalism and not the reader's lives.

9:49 And then the third component that we played with was the reader's life. And we loved the idea that you could kind of get thrown into this reader's world or their life. And for this we used full screen footage with quite wide angle lens and quite dynamic. So you really felt like even if it was for one or two seconds you got thrown into their life and then out again.

10:08 And so we wanted to figure out a way of getting all three of these elements to work in harmony. So you could talk about how they all live together and the relationship they have. So in theory, kind of on paper we thought this could work. But in reality we actually had no idea.

10:26 But we were lucky enough to have an amazing client who were willing to take this leap with us. And also an amazing team who aren't here today but kind of helped us develop this as well.

10:39 So yeah, the first thing we did is we wanted to find who we were talking about. The readers felt like they represented this independent soul, this independent life. They were found like a mixture of conversations with the New York Times, like trawling social media.

10:54 People who were really interacting with the New York Times. And we also did preliminary interviews to find who was interesting, who thought that they'd be responsive. But also had this kind of rich tapestry of things that they were doing and things that they were reading. They weren't just reading one section of the news, they were reading every part of it.

11:11 So then once we found these six people we then went really, really deep. And we worked out what they were reading, all the specific articles that they were reading.

11:19 We started to build these kind of stories. And we didn't want these to be lists. They're not designed to be lists. And we'll show you a piece in a second to show you how it all comes together.

11:30 But the idea is that it moves you through a life. It's this kind of portrait of someone whether it's a day in a life or a bigger period of time. It just moves you through who they are and you kind of arrive at the end of this full screen feeling like you know who that person is and who that subscriber is.

11:45 But the tricky thing is we kind of built this kind of rod for our own backs and we had to write that story to the format that we created. And it was a real typographical challenge. It might not seem that, but it had to fit perfectly within the 69 format or whichever canvas we were using. It had to be a lift from the New York Times. It had to be the truth, as I mentioned earlier. And it had to flow. It had to read. It had to have a cadence to it. It had to have a rhythm to it. It had to push you through the film like any script was.

12:15 But the difference here is that our script was on screen for you to read. And so we couldn't have any big gaps or the kerning. It was a massive job for each one.

12:25 And then we went about shooting the footage. And as you can see there's lots of different elements and we were really keen for it not to feel like lots of different elements doing their individual things. They had to speak to each other and feel like they're part of the same film.

12:42 So we wanted to make sure that every scene or everything that was shot related to the words or the image that came before. And here's an example of one of the readers, Jordan, who's following on the line, the basket line. In the same way that he's looking at painting, we like the fact that his eyes take you through the line.

13:06 So every frame and every shot we tried to make sure had some kind of relationship. So at least they were working together. And at the same time we were pulling these journalistic artifacts and images and it couldn't be done separately because they had to speak to the footage and the words. And when we laid them out, we really wanted them to kind of clearly embody the DNA of the New York Times.

13:32 So we took lots of different elements, whether it be the kind of headline itself, the gray line, the divider line, the date or even the byline itself. And even the ratio of the image, all of these different elements were really important to making sure that in the two seconds that you have to see this image, it felt like it was New York Times journalism that was playing a role here.

13:56 And then finally, we assembled it all together, which took a long time, as you can probably imagine, but we had to make sure that every image, every piece of footage, every word, the voiceover itself, sound design, every element had to kind of melt together so it felt like it was one film. And when the viewer was watching it, they weren't getting confused by what was happening, but they'd been taken on the journey of this reader's life. And it had to feel kind of very cohesive, but most of all it had to really celebrate the relationship between the reader and the journalism.

14:35 So the result was five or six films at launch, but we want to show you actually one of the latest films. We always thought it would be really cool to... I mean, it worked really... We love it with the kind of everyday readers, but we thought it would be really interesting to see it for a celebrity and kind of really show the side of the celebrity that you haven't necessarily seen before. And we were lucky enough to work with Queslov on the most recent film, which will play you now and hopefully takes you on a bit of a journey into his mind and into the way he thinks and show his relationship with The New York Times. Queslov is the poetry of stillness, a thundering from the... Discovering the virtues of wandering mind. I'd have to set my brain to dream. Is there anybody out there? Conflict and climate change. A new black dream. Finding purpose by giving back.

15:56 Bending genres. The hidden melodies of trains. How y'all use the new guys talk. The sacred spell of worlds. Exploring the plant kingdom's uncanny valley. The power of identity. This art was looted. A country on the brink, carving a path into the art of Philadelphia. A story of love and obsession. Affirmation as divine. How many other universes work? Thank you, Ma.

16:56 We didn't want to stop there. We took you on a bit of a journey into the process of making films for these first six or seven subscribers.

17:07 But we wanted to take it further and thought, what if there is a way, or is there a way, of doing this for every single New York Times reader? Slight problem is actually over nine million of these subscribers. So to do it manually probably would have taken us about 55 years.

17:27 But we... To make that even harder as well, every single... Because we're not doing it, we couldn't do it manually. Every single headline was a different length. It was using different type, different weight. It was different sizes of fun. So making it look beautiful and making it fit perfectly into a 4-5 or a 9-16 ratio canvas for social was quite a challenge. And so we tried to figure out a way that we could do it automatically. Yeah, so luckily we partnered with these amazing people called Hello Monday. And it's been a long time coming.

18:08 It's taken about a year or maybe eight months to get here. We wish we'd developed this before we started this campaign. But essentially we've built... We've managed to build something which is pretty interesting. It's an algorithm that takes the most... The reader's most read articles and it lays them out perfectly. It types that some in a square 4x5, whatever length or weight the headlines are. And it works... Top line, it works in an interesting way. It simulates 600 iterations of headline combinations in one second.

18:38 And then it kind of uses this kerning value, paired with some kind of image recognition to ensure like the most beautiful option is put forward to you. The most optimal version is selected. And once we developed that, we'd had this idea of doing it for a while.

18:55 But I think two weeks ago we managed to launch this thing called Story Portrait, which allows everyone in the world or every subscriber in the world to see themselves through the headlines that they've read. It's quite simple. So you go on, you log into your New York Times account, you type in your name. We love the fact that there was this connective thread between all of the work that we were doing which started with your name or however you call yourself. It's the, you know, like Laurie is, Jess is, Toby is. It's this thing that we recognize ourselves by.

19:28 But it's the connected tissue between the campaign that we spent ages making, you know, the films that we made like the one with Questlove, but the thing that you can make. So that starts in the top left-hand corner of all of the work. It then pulls in all your reading history. So it works out what you've been reading. It's based on loads of things in the back end, but it puts forward a selection. But because you've probably read more than those headlines, you can shuffle it. You can work out if you're happy with it, if it says who you are.

19:55 So there's an element of kind of like personalization to it. But once you're happy and you get some funny combos and you guys should try it in a second. Once you're happy with that, you lock it in and then it pulls in color.

20:06 And it pulls in color based on the verticals that you've been reading. So if it's politics, art, cooking or the U.S., we've kind of got these colors assigned to that and it'll build this kind of beautiful fingerprint behind the text block. And it lands you in something like this. It's very simple in its final iteration, but the road to get here has obviously been a little bit more complicated.

20:29 But yeah, we'd love you guys to have a go. It's really interesting because in advertising a lot of the time you make things, you kind of spend a lot of time making these perfect things and then you put them out into the world.

20:43 It's really fun with this one to be able to hand our idea over to other people to make their own themselves and kind of share them and share who they are. And ultimately it's like a really nice expression of the idea which is all about your independent life and independent journalism and how they connect together. So if you are a subscriber, I don't know if you want to give it a go now, we'll leave you with this to have a little play.

21:11 But yeah, lastly we just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone back in New York and of course the New York Times, amazing people and all of the partners that have helped us make this work. And thanks for listening as well. Cheers.