“It’s Dock 72. Dock 72. You got it?” Having just dropped her daughter off at school, Tiffany Rolfe, chair and global chief creative officer at R/GA, is guiding an Uber driver through the entryway to the digital marketing agency’s Brooklyn Navy Yard HQ. “OK, I’m in,” she sighs. “It’s like an army base camp or something, I swear to God. This is our old IPG space, but we’re actually moving soon.” Rolfe laughs. “And then we’ll have true independence.”

A year ago, pretty much to the day, a story leaked that holding company Interpublic Group was planning to sell R/GA after 23 years of ownership, the latest upheaval in a long series that had seen umpteen C-suite shuffles, earnings dips and chilly pronouncements of impending restructure and streamlining.

The premature news of an impending deal was, Rolfe readily admits, an unhelpful moment, one that saw the agency shoved under a harsh spotlight while stuck in a holding pattern, as the sale progressed at a frustratingly slow pace. By the time an agreement with a group led by private equity firm Truelink Capital was announced in March of this year, IPG was edging closer to being acquired by Omnicom in a looming holdco mega merge. In Rolfe’s words, R/GA became a “symbol of hope” for the rest of the industry, laying out a path free from corporate shackles.

Both Rolfe and global CEO Robin Forbes have taken a stake in the business under the Truelink deal, underlining a sense of being in control of direction and destiny. It helps, of course, when you have the credibility that comes with a client list that reads like the stuff of hypebeast dreams (Nike, Moncler, Samsung, Stone Island, Burberry etc), but Rolfe is keen that R/GA can take up position in the vanguard of tech-focused brand experiences, finding common ground with like-minded souls that want to up their digital game.

At a time when artificial intelligence is viewed with some wariness, she’s also determined to look very much to the positive. “This is where creativity is needed more than ever,” she explains. “Good things come from it. That keeps me optimistic, because I know that I can go and be part of the solution, rather than worry about what AI means. You don’t have to be fearful if you’re one of the ones helping to build what it means.”

Holding company detractors often point to the sluggish nature of the larger shops and how implementing anything new can be held back by the endless waiting for sign-off. Being able to reduce the gap between thought and expression is all. However, as Rolfe says, independence also allows an agency to think longer-term; a useful asset when it comes to planning around the possibilities of tech.

I know that I can go and be part of the solution, rather than worry about what AI means. You don’t have to be fearful if you’re one of the ones helping to build what it means

“When you think about being able to build what’s next, build new capabilities, you need to have a longer time horizon,” she says. “Not three months, but how is this going for the next three years? Not being in a public holding company model gives you a little bit of a runway, a vision to be able to take some risks, make some investments, and not look at month-to-month.”

It quickly becomes apparent that “build” is a key Rolfe (and, by extension R/GA) word. “Without doing it as an independent, it would have been really hard to innovate, to build what you need to build, to really help clients differently, to build new offerings,” she continues. “Doing that under a holding company structure would have been impossible. We get some of the benefit of being a start-up without any of the burden.”

Rolfe is looking back at the 99 days since the deal with Truelink was finalised. The establishment of a $50 million (£37m) investment fund, courtesy of the private equity firm, has allowed R/GA to set up a global AI products team, made up of specialists in generative and conversational AI and product strategy. The team will work with designers and engineers across the agency’s international outposts, with a particular focus on brand experiences.

Promoted to global chief strategy officer earlier this month, Melissa Jackson Parsey says that the fund has very much been a driver of the agency’s recent activity. “It enables us to make educated bets on where the world is moving, based on the things we’re seeing. The speed with which we can act on that and push things out to market is so important, but it’s only possible if we have the right capabilities and the right expertise.

“There’s been a collective dissatisfaction with the way the holding companies have been taking over, where their KPIs are just so different. Creativity feels squashed because it’s just not the priority.”

Using tech as a tool for growth, as much as for efficiency and effectiveness, is at the core of much of both Rolfe and Forbes’ thinking. Creativity as a business driver probably shouldn’t feel like a risky strategy in an industry like advertising, but in the current climate it does feel bracingly progressive. “We’ve undervalued our most important asset, which is creativity, because we didn’t quite know how to quantify it,” says Rolfe.

“Even the narrative around AI and around efficiency, we’re all working to work better and help our clients move faster, but if that’s the core of the message in the industry right now that worries me. How do we think about technology with creativity at the centre? How do we use it in service of building better experiences for people, building value for clients, growth? We’ve lost sight of that and maybe focused on the wrong things. And technology is resetting every expectation of every person on the planet. We have to embrace that and lean in, make it part of our lives, so we can see what we can really do with it.”

She’s confident that it’s a philosophy widely shared by R/GA’s clients and that relationships will now strengthen: “The most successful brands are ones that do new things and make decisions that hadn’t been made before, or put something out in the world that we haven’t seen, and all of that takes a level of risk. Risk has always been part of the industry. We’ve lost a bit of that trust in the relationships between agencies, their clients. When you start to become a skilled efficiency model, faceless and everything is about cost, you lose the value of those relationships.”

People are willing to work really hard if they’re passionate and excited. Everyone’s looking at each other going, ‘I’m tired and exhausted and this is wild, but this is fun’

The sense of collaboration and partnership, of being in it all together, is crucial if clients are to feel confident enough to take such risks. Following last year’s City of Genius immersive online experience for Moncler – previewing collabs with designers like Rick Owens, Jil Sander and Edward Enninful via an imagined cityscape with each high-rise representing the various collections – the Italian luxury brand teamed up with Google to produce From the Mountains to the City, a striking, visually-rich 70-second film using the latter’s generative video model, Veo, that was realised, from brief to final cut, within four weeks.

“When you give them permission to play, when we partner with clients on things and say, ‘we’re going to help, we’re going to invest some of our own time and energy into this to make it happen’, then it feels like we’re in it together,” says Rolfe. “I think clients take more opportunity to get in there. They’re all interested.”

And that sense of togetherness also goes for staff. The traumas of the past couple of years couldn’t have been easy for the R/GA workforce, but Rolfe insists that a fresh jolt of optimism has been felt throughout the various global teams, helped by a more accessible approach to management, a foregrounded growth mentality and the promise of what’s to come.

“It’s knowing that it’s leading to things that we’re putting out in the world that haven’t been made before, you sense that energy,” she says. “People are willing to work really hard if they’re passionate and excited. And you get a sense of that, like everyone’s looking at each other going, ‘I’m tired and exhausted and this is wild, but this is fun’, you know? We have the kind of team that gets excited about these new adventures. And with the work, we can say to them ‘look, we’re not effing around, right? We’ve launched new products; we’ve got new tools’.”

She does, however, readily admit that all the upheaval has been “hard on culture”, but again, being an indie allows for greater transparency than before and so people were kept informed of goings on throughout the 10-month sale period.

“We’re in a moment of clarity, we know where we’re going, what our goals are, the kind of work we want to make, what space we want to carve out for ourselves,” Rolfe says. “That independence gives us a bit of swagger, some confidence. We have carved out a new kind of identity that feels very R/GA. We have a good appetite for disrupting ourselves. When everyone else is merging, we go independent. Like WTF you know?”

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