In an exclusive first interview since its return to independence, the agency’s leadership team sits down with The Drum to explain the promise of private equity, its AI-pitch and what Bob Greenberg really thinks of the move.
R/GA’s top team: Robin Forbes and Tiffany Rolfe
Three years ago, Robin Forbes and Tiffany Rolfe would have dodged this publication’s calls. R/GA was hemorrhaging client work, critical of the “massive cracks” within the agency and lack of “organizational readiness” to move at the speed brand leaders needed. It was forced to make redundancies, restructure and attempt to turn its fortunes under mounting pressure from former owner IPG.
And to some extent, it had course corrected. In an optimistic interview with The Drum in May 2023, Forbes and Rolfe were bullish about the agency’s future. But the relationship between IPG (on the brink of a merger with Omnicom) and R/GA reached a critical point just 12 months later, with the leadership teams at both companies agreeing to explore “strategic alternatives” – in other words, a sell-off. Reports soon emerged that Tata, a management consultancy, was among the interested buyers.
“That inadvertently kicked off the whole thing,” recalls Forbes. With the benefit of hindsight, a sale playing out in public meant it could have open conversations with clients and staff. He says: “It gave us the opportunity to be as transparent as we could. We could get feedback to imagine how a future post-IPG might look and how we wanted to shape that.”
More importantly, though, it put R/GA in front of prospective buyers it might not otherwise have considered. Enter Truelink Capital.
Truelink is a private equity firm founded by Todd Golditch and Luke Myers in 2022. It has an eclectic mix of seven companies in its portfolio, including marketing firms Flipp and Ansira as well as a glass and aluminum company and an air distribution business. Private equity wasn’t something that R/GA or IPG leaders had considered, but given fellow IPG agency Huge had sold to AEA Investors and Capital Partners had invested in creative agency Highdive in the months prior, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
“We didn’t realize there’d be so much private equity interest […] It demonstrates that there’s interest in our industry to unlock growth opportunities,” says Forbes. “When you look through the lens of the holding company performance, there’s been a challenge to drive significant growth and create significant value. The private equity model is designed to identify opportunities like that, extract them and fuel them for growth and evolution.”
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On paper, the tried-and-tested route of strategic acquisition by a rival holding company or management consultancy might have been the easier path for R/GA. It would have given it scale and access to a wider network’s data, technology and clients. But it also could have meant consolidation, redundancies and maybe the eventual loss of the R/GA brand altogether.
But creative lead Rolfe says taking the risk of going independent with PE investment was a way to ensure the legacy of R/GA continued during a moment of reckoning for the industry as it grapples with AI. “We’ve always achieved our biggest growth and success through these technology shifts. There’s not a better time or company than R/GA to say, ‘Wait a minute. how do we make use of this moment, this opportunity to become something new?’ And it became really clear to us the best way to do that was to have more autonomy, more ability to change, and to find a partner that would support that growth vision. Rather than integrate into an old model, we could define the new model.”
While the sale might have played out publicly, that R/GA has now gone private means it’s not beholden to a holding company’s quarterly trading updates and relentless progress reports. It can quietly get on with the business of carving out a new future with little interference from those higher up.
“We can think about how we want to run the business, the investments, and, by the way, risks that we can take. That’s part of the thing that is appealing about private equity – there’s a different appetite for making a bet and seeing how it plays out longer term,” adds Forbes.
“We are going to operate as a standalone company. Truelink are highly experienced private equity folks but they don’t intend to run R/GA. They’re not agency people. They don’t know how to run a marketing services company or creative innovation company. Of course, we have commitments to Truelink, and there will be expectations for us to achieve certain KPIs, but it will be quite different from the holding company model where there was a significant amount of effort put into focusing on time frames and reporting.”
It’s worth noting at this point, that while Truelink has invested heavily, so too have the R/GA leadership team. The full financial terms were off the discussion table, but Forbes stressed he and Rolfe have “very real skin in the game.” Unshackled from a holding company, with a relatively hands-off partner in Truelink and their own financial stake at risk, it’s little wonder they see R/GA as going back to being a startup. Albeit one that’s been in business for nearly 50 years and has hundreds of staff located in 10 offices around the world.
Forbes and Rolfe are still mapping out their vision for the agency. They have the broad stroke ideas – they know AI is the future. They won’t be led down the garden path of integrating the tech into every aspect of R/GA in the name of “scale” or “efficiency.” They believe in generative AI as a way to innovate brand experiences, not to do more work faster or cheaper. They think this approach will open interesting opportunities for developing its own IP. It might mean acquiring other companies. They know their way of working will mean they need to move away from service and hours payment models with clients, though they’re not quite sure what that will look like – it might be different for each one.
In other words, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty on the operations and what its offering really is, Rolfe and Forbes say the same thing: “We’re giving ourselves 99 days to work it out.”
Much of the heavy lifting on the structure has already been done. As R/GA tried to recover the business from the lows of 2022, it restructured its services and global teams into five discrete “practices” including brand design and consulting; ‘connected communications’; product and experiences; media; CRM and loyalty.
(The R/GA New York office)
That structure will remain. But how AI influences the work going on in each of these pillars is Rolfe’s focus: “We were the first to think about what digital interactive interfaces were, new kinds of mobile experiences, new behaviors that we needed to shape and change, the expectations that people have. You can look at our history and the experiences we’ve launched during those moments of time, and with this new phase of generative AI, how do you continue to design those for your customers? As we think about AI, we’re ensuring we have a really unique offering and a point of view around that, which for us is not about just, you know, finding efficient ways to do the same. But new types of experiences.”
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It’s already been developing custom language models for clients such as MetLife to help it build and scale the brand differently. It’s building a generative content engine with AB InBev which isn’t just “creating personalized content, but is a really magical new kind of content experience for customers,” says Rolfe. It’s also in the process of designing a new kind of loyalty experience with a generative AI interface for an unnamed client.
Global clients such as Google, Nike, and AB InBev remain on its books. Despite the potential risk of working with a startup that’s still formulating a plan for the future, Forbes says they have been nothing short of “enthusiastic and very supportive.” Few have come through its part relationship with IPG, so there’s been no concern over “disconnecting” he adds and, in fact, his view is that the chaos in the holding companies as agencies are consolidated time and again (with yet more likely on the horizon as IPG merges with Omnicom) means the unique point of view agencies once offered has been eroded.
“The loss of those [agency] brands leads to a loss of what made their work unique. And the very best talent in the industry wants an ambitious, creative culture that stands for something. We’re going to attract talent because we offer those things in a way that some of these holding company roll-ups don’t,” he says.
Fighting talk from the new (old) kid on the block. Forbes adds: “R/GA has a legacy of capitalizing on technology at the service of creativity and innovation. We have the flexibility and agility to do that more so than ever, now that we have a partner that is investing in the business.”
That investment comes in at roughly $50m. And there’s more where it came from.
R/GA is not alone in trying to innovate for clients using AI. But Truelink wants to give it the edge with a hefty Innovation Fund. It’s been established for three things: first is for investing in new kinds of talent, and that could be upskilling or developing existing talent at R/GA or hiring new types of talent.
Second is investing in product development – its own IP. It wants to create products, software or what Forbes calls “blueprints for digital experiences” that brands effectively lease from R/GA. Some work has already been done here through its consultancy service but the CEO believes there is serious revenue that can be generated.
Finally, it wants to use the fund to bring new services into the agency. Forbes explains: “That could be creating them, you know, ourselves, or it could be acquiring capabilities externally. $50m is the minimum, meaning this is the initial fund that we have. There’s certainly, from Truelink’s perspective, the opportunity to invest further, especially when we consider external acquisitions,” he adds.
How many holding company agencies can say that?
It’s still in the very early stages of evaluating what it currently has, how it can develop it, and what it potentially wants for the future. Forbes says: “As part of that analysis, we have shortlisted a few firms that we think might be interesting. But we’re focused first on making this transition out of IPG and introducing to the markets the things that we’ve been developing ourselves before we look externally.”
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The advice they take on that, and many other aspects of R/GA as a newly independent agency, will come from a Strategic Advisory Council – which is still very much in its infancy. It will eventually be comprised of a select group of people from different sectors, eg, technology, and retail, who will input into R/GA’s direction of travel. They will guide Forbes and Rolfe on everything from how tech is impacting product categories to potential client partnerships.
“It’s not going to be a huge group of people, and it also might be one that evolves, where it’s for a period of time we get to bring people in and a rotation happens. We have thoughts on how that’s going to be structured. But we don’t have the names fully to announce yet. That is part of our first 99 days of plans,” says Rolfe.
It’s almost certain that among those feeding in thoughts will be retired founder and CEO Bob Greenberg. He famously said that R/GA’s success was predicated on it reinventing itself every nine years. “It’s more like every nine months now,” jokes Rolfe.
As R/GA braces for a new era as an independent and carves out a place for itself among the scramble of agencies offering AI solutions to clients, Rolfe and Forbes say Greenberg has been a pillar of support.
“From the beginning, he’s told us how we need to have more autonomy and has been wanting something like this to happen. This aligns with his legacy of reinvention. We realized this year, 2025, adds up to the number nine. It took nine months to go through this process. The first company that Bob sold to was Truenorth, and the company we’re selling to now is Truelink […] We are currently in the midst of writing the R/GA book and have just submitted Chapter Nine about where it’s going,” says Rolfe.
“There are so many great symbols around this that I think align exactly to what Bob set out to do at the beginning, and we now continue. Generative AI is bigger than any of the shifts he was ever a part of. And in a moment of the biggest opportunity in our industry, we have the ambition to guide it forward.”