New York Special: Matthew Gardner

Culture is a cruel mistress: you can’t just watch her go by, you have to go out and get her. Thus, Matthew Gardner, as Droga5’s director of brand influence, must not only make sure his agency’s work reflects the zeitgeist but that it generates cultural property that will enhance brands. The former music journalist explains how New York is just the place to do this

Advertising has always been about influence. At the heart of any commercial campaign – whatever platform it is made for, whatever product it promotes – the goal is to influence someone, hopefully many people, to buy that product. Obvious. But the way people are influenced has changed. Change is nothing new, you might say, the industry’s always been changing. From print, to radio to TV and online. Fair point. But what has changed in the 21st century is the infinite importance of culture and advertising’s place in it.

You can easily argue that advertising has always been a part of culture but, way more often than not, it’s been by accident rather than design. ‘Whassup!?’; ‘You’ve been Tangoed’; ‘For mash get Smash’; ‘Just Do It’. All great lines from great campaigns that entered the wider public consciousness and became part of popular culture but, generally, through repetition and chance. Now though, it seems content no longer stands alone as king, it’s joined on the throne by culture.

Someone who knows more about this than most is Droga5’s Matthew Gardner. Gardner is the agency’s director of brand influence and his role, he says, “is to sit at the intersection of [the agency] and culture in order to bring in cultural opportunities and make sure that the work we do for brands is culturally leading. But also to bring what we do for brands, to cultural properties. Basically, what I do is try to make sure the ideas we create are culturally influential.”

Gardner studied journalism at college and worked at Fader and Vice when he was “super young” writing about what he loved; mainly music and culture. While working at Fader he realised that the publication also used an advertising agency – Anomaly – on certain projects and got himself an internship there. “They put a book on my desk,” he laughs, “titled, What is Account Planning? and I just learned from there.” After the internship ended he went back to Vice, again as an intern, working with brands at their in-house creative agency. Eventually, in 2010, someone he’d worked with at Anomaly moved to Droga5 and offered him a role in the strategy department there.

But since Droga5 was bought into by talent agency powerhouse William Morris Endeavour in 2013, Gardner has essentially been a staff of one within the strategy team. His role had always been to marry creativity with culture, something it seems he was born to do, but since WME’s involvement that role has been “supercharged”. “I’ve been obsessed with music since I was born,” he says. “Collecting records, playing the guitar, all that stuff. And that was what I brought to the table as far as strategy went. It was just keeping people up to date, bringing that whole world in here.”

Gardner also thinks that working in New York makes his job a lot easier. A role that is defined by a knowledge of culture, of what people find interesting, relevant, exciting and – for want of a better word – cool, means that he needs to be constantly in tune with the zeitgeist, and the city of New York enables him to do that. “I can’t imagine doing this job in any other city,” he says. “I mean, you can walk around it in one day and be the most up-to-date, cultural person on the planet. And I also think that the people who live here are much more interested in making sure that we’re pushing culture forward and understanding where it’s headed. If you lived in LA I can’t imagine driving to a book store, record shop or coffee shop, talking to people and picking up on stuff.” 

Entering the world of influencers

Being out in the world and actually experiencing culture first hand is important to Gardner, who believes that, too often, people are too passive. “A lot of times we sit in the agency and look out [at culture], but I don’t think people realise that you really have to go out there and bring [culture] in. So I just kept doing that. I just kept one leg in that world and eventually it became something that was really powerful and valued here, especially when we got with WME. The appetite for [that kind of work] is now a lot bigger.”

Many were surprised when Droga5 announced that WME was buying a minority stake in the business, thinking that a more likely route would have been a deal with a major holding company, but the partnership has worked brilliantly. Droga5 is no stranger to leveraging popular culture to its advantage – its very first piece of work, Still Free for Ecko Unltd in 2006, saw a faked (but wholly real-looking) break-in at Andrews Air Force base and a man seemingly graffitiing Air Force One, go stratospherically viral and even appear on the national broadcast news. Then there was 2010’s Decoded for Bing/Jay-Z in which specially made extracts from the rapper’s autobiography were secreted around New York and fans could utilise Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to track them down. More recently, clever campaigns for Newcastle Brown Ale have used actress Anna Kendrick to great effect, and 2013’s Recalling 1993, for the New Museum, leveraged the culture of two previous decades to create a historical, pay-phone-focussed experiential piece of work.

“Culture is probably the best media platform brands have now,” says Gardner, “and if you can let the culture, and cultural figures, carry your message and spread it, unless you have the spend of someone like Apple, that’s probably your best bet at breaking through. We use culture itself as a platform to spread our message, and when you do it authentically, with the right people who are actually passionate about your idea, they’ll spread it for you. And if [those cultural figures] are cool and influential and it all fits right, and the people who follow them also think the idea’s cool, you’ve got, like, a billion impressions.”

Authenticity, says Gardner, is key. Partnering the right brand with the right person or cultural property is at the heart of his role and there is, he reveals, a dividing line between using influence and being an influencer. “When you get into the world of influencers,” Gardner states, “you start to see things like Lindsay Lohan tweets that have ‘#Ad’ at the end of them. It’s when influential cultural figures start to do things like selling their tweets. We don’t want to do that, we want to use influence and influential ideas. We always look at how we can make it authentic.”

Between a Rock and a hard sell

As well as partnering brands with cultural properties, Gardner and Droga5 now create brands for and through those cultural properties; effectively, celebrities are the new clients. Take Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, for instance. He is, says Gardner, WME’s biggest client; the highest grossing movie star of 2013 and the second highest paid actor of last year, and he wanted to leverage that momentum. “So we took what we usually do for brands,” explains Gardner, “which is to give them strategic guidance and develop a creative idea off that, and did that for him. Normally a strategist works with brands to build on their purpose, unlock opportunities and guide them. We applied that for the first time to one of WME’s biggest clients.” And what they’ve created is Project Rock, “a motivational lifestyle brand that’s going to expand into several different multimedia formats in the future”. 

Gardner believes that what he and his agency are doing is no longer simply competing with other advertising campaigns and messages but with the wider culture and that culture’s content. In effect, it’s no longer good enough to be the best commercial, you need to be the best piece of content. “We want to make the most culturally influential ideas,” he enthuses. “We think that the content we make should be like what Netflix is doing, what Amazon is doing and what Vice does. We think of our stuff as not ads but beautiful, culturally-leading content that people flock to.”