‘Holding companies, stop calling us’: Rethink’s Aaron Starkman on why indies matter more than ever

“I try to foster an environment of optimism,” says global chief creative officer and partner, Aaron Starkman. You only need to look at his LinkedIn bio to understand his stance: ‘We will not sell Rethink,’ it boldly spells out, in all caps. “I want a young, creative person to know if they have a crazy idea, it’s probably going to happen, as long as it’s right for the brand.”

Specifically, Starkman is blunt about WPP and its “strategy” for creativity in the age of AI, which appears, to him, to be a doubling down on the third P of the people, product, profit equation, focusing solely on profit. “It’s not about the people and not about the product,” he says, pointing to the hiring of Microsoft’s Cindy Rose as chief executive, with her background in AI and technology rather than creative advertising.

The antithesis of this approach and the refusal to be consumed by a holding company is what enables Rethink to maintain strong client relationships, Starkman believes. “Clients that come here, and that have come here in the last many years, want the thing we do,” he continues. “There’s never a situation where we’re trying to sell anything. They came to Rethink to do work that makes noise in culture, that is talked about in the mainstream press, and it exceeds the media buy in terms of earned impressions. We have this environment where it seems like anything is possible.”

Starkman likens Rethink’s goals to being “big, hairy and audacious,” which has fuelled the agency’s growth. In 2019, it was ranked the seventh-best shop in Canada, but it had the number one spot in its sights, and it has maintained it for the past six years.

“This industry is a safe haven for misfits and weirdos,” he proudly states, explaining that Rethink now aims to have 50% of its headcount as creatives. “WPP will never do anything like that. We just hired 18 creatives across North America. So, we’re doing the opposite of holding companies in terms of investing in human creativity. We wouldn’t be able to do this if we weren’t independent; we would have someone in a tower in New York or London or Paris telling us only to consider the profit implications.”

To Starkman, independence is a considerable strength that the agency will never give up. “With all these mergers happening and the diluting of agency brands, there used to be well-known agency brands that are just going away, names off the door, being merged into something else. If these holding companies are hiring people to run them with no creative advertising background, and they are destroying their own agency brands, how are clients going to trust them with brands? It seems absolutely insane for a company that specializes in brand building to destroy its own brands, reckless as well.”

The most important part of Starkman’s job is to “protect and grow” the Rethink brand. “When I wake up every morning, it's what I worry about. How is the Rethink brand doing? What can we do to continue to build it?” Even if Rethink had contemplated selling, which it won’t, it couldn’t do it anyway. “We’re set up like Wieden+Kennedy is in a structure that’s similar to a family trust, where Rethink will be independent forever.”

He shares that he gets phone calls about it all the time. Laughing, he says, “I request that holding companies stop calling us. We can’t and are never selling.” On this, Starkman says Rethink is on a mission to be the standard. “I know that sounds crazy, but we want other companies to look at the work we’re doing and try to copy us.”

Clients include Ikea, Coors Light, Scotiabank, and Molson, among others. Starkman is a “big fan” of smart writing that gets “people to react or smile” in under eight words. Makes sense, he started out in the industry as a copywriter.

When working on brand campaigns, the creatives at Rethink follow an “AI-busting” formula called CRAFTS, which stands for clear, relevant, achievable, fresh, true, and shareable. “Relevancy is something that AI doesn’t have a handle on yet,” he explains, noting a Coors Light campaign from the agency where a famous baseball player defaced one of the billboards in real life. “AI doesn’t have 100 years of ads online to reference. AI doesn’t have any examples of this incident. There are no ads online. It has nothing to reference. This is where we humans win.”

Coors Light turned an unplanned moment, a foul ball by Shohei Ohtani that broke a stadium ad, into a viral marketing campaign by embracing the imperfection and featuring the damaged ad as the centerpiece. The ‘Lights Out’ campaign went global, with limited-edition cans selling out in 24 hours and generating widespread positive social media buzz.

“The reason why I love this project so much is that we didn’t have a single meeting on this, and we acted fast. Everything with the client team was done via text and Slack,” Starkman explains. “We hate long bullshit meetings with a million people in them. It’s the enemy.”

Rethink’s team takes a slightly different approach to working with clients than more traditional ad agencies. They start off with something that they are certain will generate buzz, usually a social post, and go from there, more often than not, not having the rest of the campaign figured out. “We put it out there and see what happens in terms of public response. It’s basically real-time research,” he says. “With the world moving so fast, the industry is waking up to a new way of doing things it has to. So I think it’s important to recognize campaigns more as real-time prototypes that can evolve and change.”

He continues: “It’s a very ADHD world right now and there’s a lot of attention for eyeballs.”

It’s a real challenge to cut through, Starkman is not shy about that. “Especially when people are walking around with their eyes buried in their phone and outdoor kind of feels like spam. When you walk through Times Square, and I’m not a fan of walking through Times Square, because it’s so much coming at you at once, but it is not the best part of the industry, because it just feels like brands yelling at you.”

In his career to date, Starkman knows he has chosen the right path and that this business “doesn’t suck”; he likes what he is doing immensely. “I joke that if we do a pitch and don’t win. I always say, ‘It’s only fucking advertising.’ However, when we do win, I tend to veer on the side of, ‘Isn’t advertising the best industry in the world?’”