Interview: Global CEO Sean Lyons on the evolution of R/GA /

Sean Lyons is the first person who isn’t Bob Greenberg to run R/GA. Lyons became global CEO of the innovation consultancy in 2019 when Greenberg, who co-founded the company with his brother in 1977, moved up to executive chairman.

Lyons joined R/GA in 2005 as an executive technical director, working, he says, alongside programmers so old school they didn’t even use a mouse with their computer.

But his relationship with the agency goes back even further. When Lyons was in high school, his dad bought him a magazine on which Greenberg graced the cover, holding a 3D animated car. Since then, Lyons says, he has felt a connection with R/GA, adding that the company ‘feels like home’.

In the 16 years since he joined R/GA – save for a two-and-a-half-year excursion to run Havas’ digital operations – Lyons has had plenty of time to get to know the business, including Greenberg’s habit of radically transforming his agency every nine years, in accordance with the principles of numerology. 

Lyons was at the agency during its last major transformation around 2012, when Greenberg added a consultancy to R/GA and split the company into units of 150 people (Dunbar’s number) because he was afraid its size would drag down the quality of its work.

Anyone who keeps track of the agency’s numerological cycle (or can count in nines) will know that it was due another transformation, but even by R/GA’s standards, the past year or so has been tumultuous.

As well as the pandemic, the agency has had to deal with an exodus of senior staff, who left to join tech companies (such as Apple and Twitter) or set up their own consultancy.

Contagious spoke with Lyons over Zoom on Thursday 17 June, to ask him about the latest iteration of R/GA, his plans for the agency and how he views the ad industry.

R/GA is known as the agency that reinvents itself almost every decade. What is R/GA now and how does that differ from its previous iteration?

I think it’s an evolution of what we were before, but the philosophy remains the same: how do we use technology for creative means?

A lot of companies in advertising have an arms-length relationship with technology. For us from the beginning, it’s always been about how we use it to do the next thing. That then allows us to decide what businesses we’re going to establish within R/GA.

Our role, especially over the past year, has become much more about being an orchestrator for our clients. And that’s a testament to the fact that agencies like R/GA, which were born digital, are now lead agencies, helping clients navigate the world. So that’s been a big change for sure.

I also think there’s been a much larger push to connect different disciplines together. Combining that tension from different disciplines is a fascinating skill that we have. I say tension because there are all these different needs that clients have, and you have to really think about how to pull the teams together to find out what will really help them. Is this actually a brand advertising problem or is this actually a problem where you’re not serving your existing customers and you need to build a better relationship with them? We can use our range to offer better solutions.

When did this latest shift at the agency take place?

We made a significant change in 2019. I took over the role of CEO, Bob became chairman, and I set about saying how do I change this company.

R/GA was incredible at talking about what we did, and how we did it – and that’s important because clients want to know what they’re buying – but we were missing the why. And that ‘why’, that motivator, was really starting with the talent, so we could attract people and they could understand why they were here.

It was a really great project for Tom Morton, our CSO, and he got to go around all the offices and meet different people and arrive at this idea that R/GA can help create a more human future.

I think that purpose was a key thing for us, and I kept it inside the company for a while, because it was about creating belief in something beyond the work. But it really affected how I felt about the company. It affected our own internal data policy; I built a data ethics platform within R/GA over how we handle employee data.

And it started to be used in client presentations, because they’d ask us, ‘what’s your purpose?’ And so it became more of an outward facing thing for us, which was really incredible and unexpected, to tell the truth, but the right way it should happen.

We helped Oprah Winfrey design the identity for her book club and she had asked about our purpose and took a screenshot of her screen as we presented it to her.

Purpose has been a big component of branding for a while. Did you have an older purpose that this replaced? What did you say when people asked about your purpose before 2019?

No, we didn’t. We would talk about what we did: we deliver transformation at speed. Which is a great commercial story. We either help clients do things they can’t do themselves or we help them do it faster. It’s still the truth, but to what end? So you have to combine the commercial intention with the human intention. And I think the human angle is a great business angle for all companies to follow. If you’re looking at how to treat your customers as individuals, and you can do that with skill, then you’re going to be very successful.

Did the pandemic force a change in your strategy as a business?

If anything, we just did things faster. When you have a crisis of that scale you have little time for self reflection. You just think, ‘what do I need to do? What do our clients need us to do?’ 

But it didn’t change your plans for development as an agency?

No, not at all.

We have two different types of clients. There are clients that built their businesses before the internet, and are adapting and growing on the internet, and there are companies that were built on the internet [...] And they ask us to do different things.

With Reddit we’re helping them build a brand. With Nike, it’s a mix. Our early stage roles were helping them innovate from a technological and product perspective, now we’re helping them innovate more on the content and advertising side.

Each benefit from each other, by the way: the importance of building a brand and the importance of creating new products and services.

But the point is that those were still the things the [clients] needed. Maybe the messaging changed [...] every company had to develop communications around Covid-19. Those communications were really important, not just outside but inside the company, for the employees to see. So it had a dual purpose and that type of messaging was unique for sure.

R/GA had a lot of senior departures over the past few years. Did they change the strategy at all?

No, again it accelerated the changes to connect and integrate our services more. We’ve incubated a lot of businesses over the years and [...] eventually you need to be able to connect these things together.

If you look at R/GA’s origins, it was as a studio in computer-assisted film making. Our content studio is still core to what we do at R/GA, and it’s evolved to develop our ability to work with influencers and do interesting 3D spatial work and starting to move into AR.

That team and that group has to evolve from making films and making content to making those things. So each of these different services has its own evolutionary path, but it has to be connected with the folks that are doing advertising and the folks who are making products and services.

We’re more connected together, and that goes back to the Bauhaus philosophy and just different disciplines working together to make something new. That’s the magic so we have to carefully orchestrate that.

Prior to the departure of the group who left to set up their own consultancy, had R/GA been restructuring to diffuse its consultancy services throughout the agency and make it less of a standalone department?

I think that’s definitely one of the changes we made. When you begin to get into the consulting business you have to do it a separate way. You start to think: ‘what’s our competitive advantage against a consultancy?’ Well, we’re creative. How do we bring in the rigour that a consultancy has with the creativity that R/GA has? So you start very small and you’re protecting that team and you’re proving that model.

But over time that need to provide consulting services exists throughout the company. So how do you do that in a way that’s both effective for the craft of consulting but really results in the thing you’re proposing getting made?

What outside consultancies are doing is they’re developing a giant deck, it might be really smart but it’s like a manual for the largest piece of Ikea furniture you’ve ever seen. And if you’re really handy, maybe you can figure it out, but you’ll probably need help doing it.

What we’re able to bring in is the ability to make those things. And it’s such an essential part of the process. You learn by doing. Talking about ecommerce doesn’t get you into ecommerce. That bias for action is a great trait of ours. And if you combine that with the brilliant consulting services we have, it’s amazing.

People used to tell us that we did ‘dumb but beautiful’ work [...] But it was very motivating for us because there was some truth in it: we were very much about relying on creative instinct. And we’ve been able to build over the past five years a very deep and diverse strategic capability, and now it’s much more woven into the work that we’re doing.

Is the R/GA output that we see still the stuff that you are most proud of and which drives the agency?

That’s our driving force. The thinking and making are inextricably linked. When you separate them you end up with inconsistencies and a higher propensity for failure.

What are your plans for returning to offices?

We are fully into hybrid mode. I think the change the world’s gone through is incredible. Hugely beneficial for businesses and people. It’s extreme to have to go through it in one year where everyone has to be constantly working from home, but I like to think of it as the omni-channel workplace.

We’ve been doing this for a while now. We’ve always had teams working remotely. I’d say a third of our work happens across two offices. We were one of the earliest customers of Slack and of Zoom.

This provides an opportunity for companies to revolutionise how they work. And we’re changing our physical spaces to better take advantage of the fact that they’re bringing people together. We’re adding more rooms for collaboration, and they’re called ‘work rooms’ not ‘conference rooms’. We’re adding new tech into the rooms to enhance the experience of people who are out of the office. There’s a camera system where if you have a group of people in an office it will split them up into their own individual Zoom boxes – and the sound quality is incredible.

You need to really work at making collaboration better. There’s such an opportunity to make this work really well.

You’ve said that you compete with Silicon Valley for talent at R/GA. How do you do that?

As you can imagine you can’t compete on compensation alone. It’s impossible. I think the control you have at an agency over your work is a benefit. I think the problems you get to solve is what makes this business so fascinating. We’re also a small company, 1,700-1,800 people, and you can feel your impact here every day and that’s key.

You also come here to learn things you don’t know. And I think that’s also why we’ve become a place where the R/GA alumni are everywhere. We’re in every major technology company and I’m proud of that fact. If people succeed here they become incredible collaborators, they really do, and that’s incredibly valuable when you go into larger corporations that might be more siloed. So the competition really has to be about the work.

Are you optimistic about the advertising industry in general at the moment?

I don’t necessarily feel like I have a position to speak on behalf of the whole industry.

As long as the industry is [...] helping companies do things they haven’t done before and leading them to business growth, we’re going to have a good future.

It’s quite a resilient industry in that way; it’s going to ebb and flow with the overall economic health of companies, but I think we could be doing more for our clients and I’d like to see more change.

Do you agree that individual agency brands have become less important, and if so, does that concern you?

I think clients understand the value of agency brands like they understand their own brand. So agency brands are still important. Are they different enough? Probably not. Are there too many of them? Probably. The most discerning clients understand what they’re buying. If you have the work and the teams and the results to back it up, you’re fine.

How much do you think the new digital privacy norms will impact your business?

Not significantly in terms of how we work. There’s always been more value in first-party data and the information you have from your customers, and that’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning. When you think about our work with Nike Plus and the banking work we do with our clients, that information is really important and you can build a lot of great work from that, and there are insights that you can use to serve customers better. I think that’s the key: how do you move beyond transactions with that data to relationships? And I think that for us is one of the bigger shifts we’re dealing with: relationship design. It’s very hard for companies to do it at scale, but you can do it.

The third-party data stuff is changing the strategies of the media companies more, but we’re not an at-scale media company, so it’s not a real concern of ours.

Photo by XR Expo on Unsplash

You’re on record as saying AI will be the next big area of innovation. Can you tell me how you think that tech will benefit you and your clients, because it seems to be an area of tech with a lot of false dawns?

I’m just fascinated by transitions in technology. When photography was invented around the 1830s it was used to replicate portrait painting. It was the same with film, which was used to replicate theatre. 

Not much has changed with VR and I believe that’s because it’s trying to replicate the physical environment entirely. But what’s interesting is if you think about it as a whole new medium and think about it creatively, and that’s where mixed reality and AR comes in.

Imagine the game that exists in 3D but then I carry that game out into the real world. We’ve seen bits of that with Pokémon Go, and Snapchat is doing fascinating things with AR, but those things take a lot longer than people think.

But when you think about AI the fascinating transition process is from usable interfaces like buttons and clicks, to invisible interfaces, decisions that are being made behind-the-scenes and it can be done through voice and it can be done through algorithms that are providing you with recommendations, I think that invisibility has been the hardest thing for people to reckon with. I think there’s tremendous creative applications for AI.

Also, how do you use that technology to create content? How do you use GPT-3 as a technology to create content? How does generative visual design happen? Can we use AI to design interfaces? Can we use AI to design artwork? Yes, we can. 

That shows true confidence when you’re willing to give up creative control to another human creation. That’s where I find the next movement. And it might be three to five years out until we start seeing some cool things.

And it’s not just about efficiency, you can create new things entirely with GPT3 and generative design. How do we apply it commercially? We’ll see. But if you’re not open about it and use it in the beginning, you’re not going to know how to apply it. 

Do you intend to continue Bob Greenberg’s nine-year innovation cycle? Is there another transformation coming in seven years?

I look at this job in three year increments. Three years is a very understandable thing. I can look out three years and understand it. But the nine year increment is a gift because, one of our core principles is that we’re only ever 80% complete, and it’s been great to communicate that. It gives you an openness to change. Some people don’t like it because they want things to be complete, but it’s perfect to be incomplete. The changes we will make over the next nine years will be significant, but do we use that nine-year moment for a bigger shift? Possibly yes, it’s a great motivation. But the reality is we’re moving a lot faster than that.