This Major Ad Agency For Google, Samsung, And Nike Just Bought Back Its Independence

After 23 years as part of advertising and marketing services holding company IPG, creative agency R/GA bought back its independence through a new partnership between R/GA’s global management and private equity firm Truelink Capital. 

It marks the official announcement of a move reported by AdAge earlier this month, and after leaks about a potential sale emerged last summer. The management team leading the agency back to private business is headed by R/GA’s global CEO, Robin Forbes, and chair and global chief creative officer Tiffany Rolfe. Truelink Capital is also an investor in marketing tech companies Flipp and Ansira, as well as experiential marketing firm GES. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

R/GA’s current major global clients still include Google, Samsung, Moncler, TurboTax, Nike, and Eli Lilly.

The move comes as IPG awaits approval of its merger with fellow public holding company Omnicom, which would create the world’s largest advertising services firm. R/GA’s new partners at Truelink have established a $50 million Innovation Fund for a boost in new skill sets and talent, as well as acquisitions for new capabilities, emerging tools, and platforms. The agency is also establishing a Strategic Advisory Council of senior marketing and technology executives to support emerging AI client transformation opportunities across multiple sectors.

Forbes and Rolfe spoke exclusively to Fast Company about the deal and what it means for the agency. Both focused on the age-old industry debate between the freedom and flexibility to innovate in independence versus ultimately being a cog in a much larger publicly traded machine.

“It made sense that, for the kind of company that we are, we needed to ensure we can change how we work and the model that we deliver to clients with more autonomy,” says Rolfe. “To really look at a longer horizon for how we think about our business.” 

R/GA made its name and reputation through its innovative work for brands during the first digital revolution, and Forbes and Rolfe say this new iteration of the agency is aiming to use that DNA to forge its future in the AI age. The company has been investing in AI-related tech for the past decade, particularly through its venture arm with companies like Reply.ai and Clarifai. 

“This moment is for us to really accelerate the evolution that we’ve been working on for some time of both the services that we offer, but also the way we’re doing our work,” says Forbes.

A new day one

It’s no secret that over the past few years, IPG’s digital agencies, including R/GA, have struggled financially. As other holding companies have done in recent years IPG has sold and consolidated many of its agency holdings. Last year, it sold once-hot agency Huge to private equity firm AEA Investors, and sold agencies Deutsch New York and Hill Holliday to Attivo Group.

R/GA has faced multiple layoff rounds and executive departures in recent years, after two decades of leading in digital advertising and brand work. Among many other things, this is the shop that created Nike Plus (2006), the viral Straight Outta Compton campaign for Beats By Dre (2015), and won the Super Bowl for Reddit with a five-second ad (2021). 

There is no single reason that the agency was considered extraneous by IPG, but the leak of an impending sale last summer actually created a silver lining for Forbes, Rolfe, and the rest of the leadership. The process of buying back the agency could be done in public, and they could talk to clients about the implications and opportunities out in the open. The response from both its employees and clients was positive, which gave the team confidence and momentum in speaking to potential suitors. 

Now, Rolfe says that this is like a new day one for the agency that provides the opportunity to become a 48-year-old startup. “We have the legacy of experience and knowledge, but now we get a little bit of a refresh,” she says. “There’s this moment now where you can disrupt the idea that you have to be this big, scaled holding company size to address Fortune 500 clients. Or if you look at startups, what are many missing? What can’t they do? And I think we have enough scale but can still be agile. We have real deep experience with Fortune 500 types of scaled problems, and we can address that and build teams in a really modern agile way that allows us to address a lot of different needs.”

New venture

In any instance where a company embarks on a major shift like this, you will hear words like reinvention, reinvigoration, and the like. But what makes this more tangibly intriguing is the $50 million fund the agency has to work with to actually put concrete moves behind those words.

Forbes says the focus of the fund is on three distinct areas. First, new hiring and training in order to upskill its talent base and augmenting its current talent with new kinds of skill sets. Second, product development in the form of blueprints or accelerators for improved and innovative work, that can result in IP and other assets. And third, building in new capabilities through acquisition.

“We’re really excited about the concrete commitments to actually deploying capital in the business to accelerate this growth and this transformation mission that we’re on,” says Forbes. “It’s extra fuel to accelerate some of the things that we’ve been wanting to do, and feel are really important to do quickly.”