In an industry that regularly spawns hot shops, R/GA is more the legacy agency of the future. It may not be the stuff of which slogans are made, but it is living and thriving in the future that founder Bob Greenberg envisioned decades ago.

R/GA grew up building digital tools and services clients needed when they didn’t already exist, and still does. Today R/GA gets almost half its business—49%—from product and service design, brand and organization design, innovation, consulting, Venture Studios and licensing intellectual property.

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The other 51%—the more conventional agency part—is doing quite nicely, too. R/GA logged 86 business wins in 2021, a pitch win rate of 76% that generated $97 million in global new business revenue, $70 million of that in the U.S. That meant the agency topped R3’s U.S. new business rankings and placed near the top globally. R/GA wins in 2021 included Amazon, Allianz, American Express, CVS, EA, LifeScan, Roku, Samsung and the XFL.

Combined with healthy growth from existing clients, an agency that two years ago was Ad Age’s “Comeback Agency of the Year” is now clearly all the way back—placing No. 2 on the 2022 Agency A-list.

All coming together

“A few years of work with this leadership team really came together in 2021,” said Global CEO Sean Lyons, who took over the role in 2019. “It shows up in terms of who’s right for R/GA in terms of the pitches we go after—and also the decisions on how we build teams and the work we’re creating.”

The agency’s stated purpose—“designing businesses and brands for a more human future”—really does guide what R/GA does, Lyons said. "It’s hard for an agency to have a purpose in some ways, because it’s a service industry and you work for a variety of companies. But it’s been an amazing tool for us to focus our thinking.”

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R/GA has attracted two types of new clients over the past year, said Global Chief Strategy Officer Tom Morton. “One is high-growth new economy companies that suddenly realize they need to start showing up in the world like brands,” Morton said. These include Reddit, Roku, Tonal home gym and the Zip payment system.

“The other,” Morton said, “is the more mature companies figuring out what the next stage of growth is going to involve and how you serve customers through experience and technology as much as through communication.” An example of that, he said, was the virtual experience business of American Express, R/GA’s first big win of 2021.

Treating media as creative

R/GA’s media practice grew by 50% in revenue last year around the philosophy of treating media as a creative discipline. Nowhere was that more obvious than the “Superb Owl” Super Bowl campaign for Reddit, which won a social media Grand Prix at Cannes, part of a haul of 10 Lions that led R/GA’s best-ever overall year for awards performance.

Reddit brought R/GA on early in 2020 to help with branding. Previously, Reddit, like many of R/GA’s other new economy clients such as Google or Slack, had an “if we build it, they will come mentality and hadn’t thought much about branding or marketing,' said Reddit Chief Marketing Officer Roxy Young. The Super Bowl spot sprang from Reddit noticing a surge in its Wall Street Bets community, which was gaining attention by moving stocks like GameStop sharply higher. “As a marketer, I knew we had to do something to capture this moment and shape the narrative,” Young said.

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So Young asked R/GA for ideas in late January, never mentioning the Super Bowl. That led to a meeting on Feb. 1, 2021, the Monday morning before the game, where R/GA brought a set of ideas that included a five-second Super Bowl spot. “I think instinctively we all knew that was it,” she said. “And in the course of four business days, we made something happen that I think was impactful and really shared the power of the community.”

Young sees it as R/GA making good on what Reddit asked for in its 2019 RFP. “They have an appreciation for all of the technology,” she said, “to help us share the bigger and broader story of why we exist.” 

The long-copy five-second spot, purchased regionally, featured a jpeg of text made purposely too long for anyone to read, so viewers were forced to pause or rewind, then go online to get the message. It generated 6.5 billion impressions, twice those earned by the most expensive Super Bowl buy of all time—Procter & Gamble Co.’s multiple-spot “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign of 2018, according to R/GA. Traffic to Reddit spiked more than 25%, crashing the platform briefly during the game.

Helping Verizon and Michaels adapt

That same Super Bowl, R/GA helped Verizon adapt when COVID-19 upended plans for an in-person sponsored showcase of the power of its 5G network. So it enlisted Fortnite designers to create a virtual replica of Florida’s Raymond James Stadium, site of the game, using Verizon’s 5G network to replicate it down to the smallest detail. Then the virtual stadium opened to fans, influencers, gamers and NFL players.

“There is no agency better at using technology or understanding platforms to create new experiences,” said Verizon Chief Marketing Officer Diego Scotti. “And when there is an impossible challenge to solve, I think they’ll always take it on and deliver.”

R/GA Global Chief Creative Officer Tiffany Rolfe “is my first call when we have a crazy idea,” Scotti said. “And their response always is ‘let’s do it.’”

R/GA hasn’t been all about telecom or tech clients. It also won a Silver in the initial Business Transformation Lions at Cannes for reshaping the very old-economy Michaels stores. The craft retailer was losing ground to Walmart and Amazon.

So Michaels hired R/GA to reinvent its brand and stores, which it did with a plan to go beyond “the grandma version of crafting” to create spaces in stores and online for younger makers, Morton said.

Sales, which had been declining, rose 15% year-over-year, he said, and the stock more than tripled as it was ultimately bought out by private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Social justice focus

Social justice issues have become not just an add-on, but an increasingly integral part of R/GA’s work. The agency last year hired political communications strategist Ashish Prashar—a veteran both of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and a former press secretary to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London—as chief marketing officer.  He’s been vocal about justice-related causes, including introducing a Clean Slate program at R/GA and a creative industry event focused on addressing mass incarceration.

For Sephora, R/GA created the “Black Beauty is Beauty” campaign, which included search engine optimization to help “Black Beauty” products break through all the search results for the well-known book and its film adaptations.

For Google, R/GA joined The Guardian and the Royal National Institute of Blind People to create Auditorial—a new approach to editorial development that lets users with sight loss experience stories on the internet with customized visual settings and full control over audio and text.

And when the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in May, prompting a flood of refugees, R/GA helped launch the Welcome.US campaign. The collaboration with refugee resettlement groups, three former U.S. presidents and three former first ladies included a website that drew 1 million unique visitors in 24 hours—including more than 50,000 from Afghanistan—to help match refugees with resources.

As R/GA has staffed up amid growth, it hasn’t lost sight of diversity, reporting progress quarterly. People of color made up 51% of U.S. hires in the past year, with the U.S. proportion of Black, Indigenous and People of Color rising 3.4 percentage points to 39.4% overall and four points in the executive ranks to 23.7%. Women make up 54% of overall talent, 45% of executives and 46% of the creative department.

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“There are easier places to work,” Lyons acknowledged. But himself a “boomerang” who left R/GA for Havas in 2013 then returned in 2015 as U.S. CEO, Lyons said the agency now is attracting several other returnees “who left during the pandemic and now want to come back. And nothing feels better than that.”