R/GA Hudson Yards Closure
IMO, the recent news that R/GA is closing its (new) Hudson Yards office is a defining moment of change for the advertising agency business.
When I first heard about it, the thing that came to mind was Gary Hustwit's documentary film called Workplace which chronicled the design and building of that magical new space in that magical new neighborhood.
The film presented a future-perfect view of creative teams working together, shoulder-to-shoulder. The thinking was so simple. So unambiguously clear and exciting.
Curating an experience for your employees is as important as it once was only for your customer ... If you have the talent, the place will be cool, which will draw the clients.
With Pritzker-winning architect Norman Foster and Cannes Lion-winning communication designer Rob Greenberg leading the collaboration, the project was an exploration of the possible.
A demonstration of what comes next.
A real-world test of whether this approach would drive commercial results.
The new office itself was an experiment on a grand scale of the intersection of spatial design and digital communications. In my imagination, it was what Times Square would look like if it was designed by Jonny Ive.
And then came the pandemic.
And after that, the announcement:
Today, 45% of our US employees live far from our offices, and 80% of our project teams bring together talent from more than one location ... Our distributed creativity model will be the standard for a post-pandemic creative business. It means we can be faster, better and cheaper for customers.
R/GA was going fully remote!
Our industry has always been about doing new things in new ways. We (along with our clients) are in continuous transformation. You can either slide into change, or leap. And leaping is leading.
In the industry, R/GA has been known as a bellwether. Front of the line. So dropping the office was not surprising coming from them first. EXCEPT FOR THE GRAND EXPERIMENT.
Yet I wonder if this marks more (1) industry change or (2) R/GA change?
Did the pandemic accelerate the crisis that Ken Auletta described years ago in Frenemies? That the media landscape would digitize into something unrecognizable and unprecedented, and kill the Mad Men era agency business model? Definitely, as measurable by the number of people who moved from agencies to platforms (eg, Ogilvy to Facebook) relative to the number of people who moved the opposite direction (eg, Facebook to Ogilvy)..
Or rather, did it accelerate the product lifecycle for R/GA as an agency? The announcement made it clear that the move was about staff reductions, and not limited simply to new ways of working.
When I think that R/GA is essentially moving from Hudson Yards to the cloud, it becomes clear that the little automations here and there have been adding up this whole time. It is technological determinism. It feels like the units of measurement of an agency's footprint are changing from square feet of office space to terabytes of data center hosting.
I still think the world of R/GA. They led our industry’s pivot to digital. They broke down the barrier between communications and product. They did their own thing for a good long time before IPG came along.
You can watch Workplace here ...
You can read Adweek's coverage (subscription required) here ...
