Back in March, it was announced that R/GA was going indie again, with backing from a private equity firm, after 23 years under IPG management. Tiffany Rolfe, chair and global chief creative officer, and chief executive officer Robin Forbes invested in the company as part of the deal. Rolfe says it was “great but also scary” to have “skin in the game.” The company gave itself 99 days to “work it out,” which was meant to ensure it “kept the momentum up,” Rolfe told The Drum.
Based in New York, Rolfe has been at R/GA for almost seven years now. As our interview gets underway, we dive into how those headline-making first 99 days have gone, which she describes as having simultaneously felt “long and short.” She likens this year to being “projected out of a sling shot” because the shift in momentum and positivity has felt so sudden. Going indie again, she feels, was the positive story that the advertising industry needed. “There’s still love for agency brands and we’ve seen a lot disappear – you know, legacy brands that really meant something,” she says. Recently, she even hired a chief brand officer to help shape the agency’s perception.
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Since gaining control and no longer being within the holding company structure, Rolfe explains that R/GA has been able to think about investment, such as in AI, in a more “long-term” way, as opposed to “monthly margins.” She says that being with IPG meant thinking in terms of “certain boxes” to keep “everyone in their zones” and not replicating services. “We knew that framework, that model, needed to be changed for the way that work needs to be defined. The new kind of creative companies that will support brands for the future need to operate differently. And so, the ability to redefine what a new model is in our industry and beyond, as well as what creativity actually means today, presented a real opportunity for us to help guide and define it.”
Overnight, she explains, it felt that R/GA could “write its own future” again, one that it had hoped for, and that there’s “oxygen in the room” now. She explains that she no longer thinks of it as an agency, but rather as an “agency with agency.”
It comes at a time when adland is undergoing one of its most significant disruptions with the adoption of AI. For Rolfe, it’s not just about embracing it; she has always been drawn to technology and is genuinely passionate about it. In the late 1990s, she began her career as a web designer at an agency called DPS Media Group, which she also founded. “I don’t want to age myself,” she laughs, “but I’ve been around for almost every tech shift.” She believes this is the biggest one yet.
Rolfe has been pivotal in helping build R/GA’s new AI products team, which is “leveraging” its creative offerings. “Our approach to creativity now is about making things that make things,” she adds. “The real opportunity we see is using AI to build new things, new kinds of experiences that are better. I can tell you that most people don’t want more of the same from our industry. You want new and better. Leveraging AI but in service of craft is really important.”
Shifting to an AI-first model, R/GA is building campaigns, interfaces and brands that can generate, create and collaborate with customers in highly personalized ways. To support this, it is updating operations, talent needs and client-pricing structures while reusing internal blueprints. It’s ongoing and a mammoth task.
It’s curious to consider the two sides of Rolfe, with her relentless creativity paired alongside her future-focused enthusiasm for AI. She acknowledges that with new technology, there often comes a lot of “tension,” which can feel like a “versus” situation. It’s apparent she’s not as excited by the “efficiency” surrounding AI as she is with the new experiences it can create. From a design perspective, Rolfe is excited by AI’s power to express true creative intention at scale. An AI-driven brand system can continually generate on-brand variations based on its original training, which also opens up collaborations with customers and user-generated content, even if that can be a bit of a “fear” for some in the industry.
R/GA is no longer hiring creatives who aren’t embracing new technologies either, she says. After leaving IPG, deciding on the type of talent R/GA wants has been a positive shift, as the process is slightly different from getting talent approved within the holding company organization. “As creative people, we can sometimes define our creativity in terms of the things we make. And maybe that’s because artists originally were defined as painters, they made paintings. We make these things, we make a film, we make an ad, we make a poster. And I’ve always found that’s problematic in a world where the medium and technology are always changing the outputs.”
Rolfe believes creatives need to adapt and meet people “where they are” and how they like to engage, seeing AI as a way to enable creations that can replicate, evolve and scale far beyond the original idea. “We can be in control of how it gets used,” she shares. Nobody wants to “pump out” work that isn’t great.
R/GA, Rolfe explains, used to separate storytelling from systematic technology, but now stories and systems are integrated. The focus is on building “atoms of creativity” that power systems capable of autonomously expressing stories. “I’m a tech optimist. If you just say fingers crossed, or I’m going to avoid this and hope it all goes well, it actually means that, more than likely, things aren’t going to go in the way that we want them to.” You need to play around with AI, experiment with it and, ultimately judge it, Rolfe believes. Likening it to the initial days of music streaming, she believes we’re in the beginning, “messy” stages of AI and that this will “play out,” but it shouldn’t prevent the industry from getting to grips with it.
Scale also looks hugely different to Rolfe now with these new tools. She views technology as a means to scale impact beyond traditional measures of success, enabling R/GA to reach more people in new ways. Growth is still essential, but it must be tied to consistently creating value. “It’s not growth for growth’s sake. Its growth and service of something that accomplishes a great goal.”
In terms of clients, introducing new technology changes not just the work itself, but how teams collaborate, review and scope projects. “We’re about to launch what we’re calling a generative interface for a brand,” she announces. “Can’t talk about it yet, but it will be out next month. It’s the vision we had a year ago. And now we have a client that came to us ambitious, wanting to do that.” Rolfe won’t divulge who that client is right now, but says it is an “AI-oriented” company. “The greatest thing I can say about it is that the first page in the brief was almost a bit of a call to arms. It said, ‘Websites are dead; digital agencies are irrelevant. Prove us wrong.’ That, to me, was the most awesome brief.”
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With its new indie status and huge focus on tech, Rolfe feels “invigorated” and, after being in the industry for over 20 years, thinks that her job is still “pretty exciting.” She feels that it’s a moment where she is getting to learn everything all over again. “Growth has always been about new for me. I always say I’m one of those people who’s more comfortable in the uncomfortable. I love the brief that isn’t even a brief yet, where it’s a question. ‘We need this. How can you help us?’ Creativity is where you can bring new thinking, new ways, new approaches to problems.”
As a leader, Rolfe is “humble” and “confident” because she knows people within R/GA are looking to her for answers, which she’s comfortable not always having. She juggles showing up in a big way for her team while also being present as a mom for her family. (During our interview, she takes an urgent call from her daughter at school who needs her. “I thought it was an emergency,” sighs Rolfe. “Just a sneaker emergency!”)
A few years ago, she was planning a workshop called AI Improv to explore new AI tools, while also managing to plan her daughter’s birthday. “Sometimes, you have to hack life to make it work as a leader, so I used it to plan my daughter’s birthday. And it actually was one of the best uses of the tools. I did what I needed for work and I also planned my daughter’s birthday. And, in turn, it gave me a lot of new ideas on how to leverage the technology in a way that matters to people. It became an experience we shared. I generated all the invites and I got to show some of the things I learned about what was missing in its capabilities.”
Rolfe emphasizes the importance of being comfortable as a perpetual learner, even in a long-established career. While junior team members may know the technology, her value lies in understanding how and why to apply it, highlighting the ongoing importance of human judgment. “You can make a lot of things that look like what we humans make, but why you choose those things, the decisions, that’s always been our value. For most people entering the industry, they think they can probably do things better than they are being done, but that’s what we need from young people. We don’t need them just to jump in and fit into an old system. We need them to come in and disrupt it.”
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R/GA
R/GA is a global independent creative innovation company with offices across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific regions. We harness design and technology to create...