R/GA Australia has hit the reset button under the helm of a new leadership team and a business model backed by a network without borders.
The agency, which was founded in 1977 in the US by Bob Greenberg, hit Australian shores in 2013.
Over the last year and a half, the business has been slowly rebuilding itself with an almost entirely new leadership team.
With the exception of Jon Holloway, chief strategy officer, who recently returned to the business, and Lara Hewitt, head of talent, the rest of the team have joined over the last year and a half.
Armed with a fresh strategy to renew the business, managing director for the Sydney office Victoria Curro, who joined R/GA late last year, says coming together as a new team allowed for the agency to completely reset itself and the way it worked with clients.
“This time last year, we had started to become an agency that was growing out of itself,” Curro tells AdNews.
“A lot of our clients like Telstra were taking a lot of work that we were doing in-house as that was happening across the industry.
“We really wanted to think about the value that we were bringing to our clients, how we could change that up and how we could create a model that was quite different.”
The reset comes at a time when globally R/GA is embarking on its nine year cycle of change. Together, the global agencies are now positioning themselves to design for a human future.
"Our next nine years will be built around the idea of designing businesses and brands for a more human future," says Curro.
"Our focus will be around humanising technology to help our clients and partners find innovative ways to serve people better."
R/GA’s heritage is built on consulting, design, communications and technology but over the years Curro says these components had become siloed within the business.
By bringing these all back together, she describes it as the agency’s new “superpower” offering.
“[It’s] not necessarily a bunch of disciplines all under one roof but a new model that brought those things together in a different way,” she says.
“Then we set about bringing together the band - the One Direction - to make sure that we could make that happen.”
Or as Holloway refers to the team, “S Club 7”.
“What we’re doing is blending capabilities,” says Curro.
“It used to be, you could come through the consulting door and your come could come through the design door or you could come through the tech door or the communications door.
“Now it’s one door and what we do is bring the best of those things together.”
The band
Hewitt was tasked with bringing together the “band” and making sure they were the right fit for both the agency and to execute the reset.
She began with Michael Titshall, who was appointed as VP, managing director of Australia, in April last year to replace Rebecca Bezzina who has since returned to the network, working in its London office.
Curro was next, joining the team from M&C Saatchi’s LIDA, in November and shortly followed by Ciaran Park in December.
Park joined the team as executive technical director from AnalogFolk and brought with him experience spanning creative coding, systems, tools and solution definition, R&D and prototyping.
He plans to build out the agency’s technical offering and blend both the physical and traditional worlds that brands operate in.
“To us, they’re one in the same thing and we need to make sure the journey they’re going through, the consumer can see and understand all the way through,” says Park.
“From a technical point of view, that’s helping the customers to adapt to this technology very quickly. I’m here to help them unlock those new technologies, understand them and use them in the right way.”
As the hiring spree continued for the team, the pandemic hit which meant that Kieran Antill, ECD, and Ben Miles, ECD of APAC for R/GA’s consulting practice Business Transformation, were onboarded virtually.
Holloway, who had formerly been MD before departing in 2016, also returned to the business during this period as executive strategy officer.
When quizzed about why he decided to rejoin the business, he says a lot of things influenced him.
“It’s the best decision and very easy. It feels like somewhere that is trying to actually make a difference,” says Holloway.
“Sounds a bit like a first world speech but you can’t walk into a meeting here without someone challenging you whether you are operating at a different altitude, whether you are being transformative.
“We push each other and the industry itself needs that. We are a consultancy-based business but we come at it from the digital ecosystem space.”
Borderless team
“It’s not just about bringing in talent though, because anyone can do that,” says Curro.
“What we wanted to do was to create a way of working that was quite different. It’s a lot leaner so we have much more senior people on the front line for clients.
“I think that’s what you need to compete with consultants. They have this real depth of expertise.”
While most of the leadership team sits in the Sydney office, Titshall is based in Melbourne and they work closely with other R/GA offices around the world.
Being able to lean into a global network is often touted as one of the pros to working with global agencies but as Curro notes, it very seldom happens.
At R/GA, they have been using a global resourcing model since pre-pandemic.
“If we want an expert on financial services, we can find someone who has worked with nine digital banks and bring them into the room with a client,” says Curro.
“With COVID, we were a step ahead because geography doesn’t really matter in our business. So, that made it really easy to transform to that world of working anywhere as well.”
As they continue to ensure they offer clients a consulting style approach within the agency, the team can reach out to anyone within the R/GA network around the world to bring together the right specialists.
For example, Miles has been working closely with the Singapore office on a number of pitches and projects since he joined.
“A lot of businesses talk about being a global company but this is the first time I’ve felt like a part of a global organisation,” Miles tells AdNews.
“You’re literally one click away from getting everything you need. Everybody is so supportive across the network.”
Throughout the height of the work from home period, many creatives have argued that collaboration is not the same when working apart.
Miles thinks differently though. He says since returning to the office, the team has redesigned the space to accommodate a hybrid approach to work.
“Of course it helps,” he says.
“But actually, the thinking time, the space you get sat at home with no distractions and energy to go and think. Then you come back together.
“It’s exactly why this space (the office) is being redesigned to enable us to come back to communicate, to come together and interact. Whereas, the home time is your time and I think it’s amazing. I think the productivity levels are just going sky high.”
The new normal
Despite the turbulence 2020 has brought and change that R/GA has undergone itself, Titshall says the team has had a strong year.
“We’re actually having our biggest year in Melbourne that we’ve ever had,” Titshall tells AdNews.
“This style of work that we do is very much digital experience products and services, and given the nature of people’s change in behaviour during COVID and with everything online, we’ve actually been really well poised to help clients adapt to that.”
The shift towards an online-first mentality has been on the horizon for some time but as Titshall notes has been accelerated by the pandemic.
Now brands need to be able to move beyond traditional comms work, prove that they have a purpose beyond selling a product or service and offer an exceptional customer experience.
“The combination of these things mean that we’re defining the new economy,” he says.
“But many of our clients and brands need to compare these different worlds so they’re bringing together this more systematic customer experience kind of thinking and combining that with creativity and brand thinking.”
Pitching sans pandemic is an art form.
This year, everything agencies had perfected previously was completely turned on its head.
Much like online dating, Curro says the team have been working to build rapport virtually with new and existing clients.
As R/GA reset itself internally, she says the team also developed new pitch guidelines which led to it scoring a number of new clients throughout the pandemic including alcohol delivery service Jimmy Brings.
“We’ve created some different pitch guidelines, about how to pitch on Zoom, how to make sure that people know when to talk, when not to talk, make sure the team is a bit more rigorous as to who’s on the line,” says Curro.
“What happened was, when everything closed down in New York, they had about five or six pitches already lined up. So what they learnt and were able to share with us and vice versa meant that we were able to quickly create some pitch guidelines that really started to work.”
Likewise, the global teams have been watching R/GA Australia closely as they pave the way for the return to the office.
Prior to the return, Hewitt says the leadership team ensured the broader agency was connected and engaged while also reminding them that it was okay to have days to switch off.
Regular meetings happen on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday to check in on the team and see where everyone is at.
To offer some certainty in what has been an uncertain and unpredictable time, the leadership team has made it a priority to be transparent with the team.
The agency has also moved towards a work from anywhere model where the office is used as a hub for face-to-face meetings and collaboration.
The team is encouraged to travel off-peak when they do come into the office which usually occurs on a Tuesday or Thursday.
Miles says they have made the move to a compulsory two days a week and the rest falls on the team to make up the hours as suits them.
“We came together as a team in a period of massive disruption where we’ve actually had to go, okay, well we’re going to have to disrupt ourselves,” says Miles.
“Innovation comes from disruption, so we literally had to go, okay, we’re starting a new company together, we’ve got to rethink everything and this space.
“The way we interact, the way we get to know each other and I don’t think there’s any other business in this space that could facilitate that in the way that R/GA has.”
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