A Covid legacy: How R/GA adapted to survive

Just over two-and-a-half years ago much of the world faced a situation that none of us had confronted before. 

“You must stay at home,” Boris Johnson, the UK’s then Prime Minister, told the country in a televised address on March 23, 2020. Across the globe similar instructions were being dispensed from other leaders, and so the world – and our lives – immediately changed. 

Some of those changes have come to revolutionise not just how advertising operates, but working life across a multitude of industries.

Some of those changes, far from being short-lived, as many of us thought they would be, have come to revolutionise not just how advertising operates, but working life across a multitude of industries. And while the Covid-19 pandemic had - and continues to have - serious and far reaching consequences beyond how we work, now that it’s in the rearview mirror, it’s interesting and instructive to look at what changed, what didn’t and how the industry has adapted. 

Above: March 23, 2020, the UK's former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, delivered the speech that ushered in the first lockdown.

Over the next few weeks we will be examining different sectors of the advertising industry to get a rounder picture of those changes, but the experiences of R/GA London’s leadership team acts as a case in microcosm. 

On a Friday in mid-September Managing Director Rebecca Bezzina and SVP and ECD Nick Pringle sit in the company’s office in east London. They, along with the agency’s VP of Marketing and Communications, are welcoming, open and chatty. They also comprise about 95 per cent of the people present in the office. Three years ago such a scene would have been both unlikely and unsettling but, post-Covid, office life is no longer what it was. 

We thought it would be a week then it would be over, but that was the last time we ever used the Clifton Street offices.

“I clearly remember,” says Bezzina, “it was a week before the official lockdown. We had a sense of what was going on so we decided to get everyone home quickly so we could get screens to them, so we could prepare. We thought it would be a week then it would be over, but that was the last time we ever used the Clifton Street offices.” 

That much larger, glass-fronted location is a stone’s throw from where we now sit, but the new office (a temporary affair while they look for a more permanent base), while very nice, is much smaller. As we all know, though, office size isn’t everything, especially now. But before explaining how R/GA has adapted to life post-pandemic, Bezzina and Pringle talk about the challenges they faced when the lockdown was first announced. 

Above: R/GA London's Rebecca Bezzina and Nick Pringle. 

One of the main challenges was that neither of them had been in their London roles for very long. Both are long term R/GA-ers, but Bezzina was working for the company in Australia until seven weeks before the pandemic lockdown, when she moved to London for her new role. Pringle worked in the New York office, only moving back to London on 1 June 2020, at the height of the lockdown, and into a situation where the whole agency worked remotely. “We didn’t know each other super-well,” says Pringle, “but we kind of knew each other. However, neither of us knew anyone else in the office and the job was to come in, set a vision, get people motivated, get them organised and get on with the work. And we had to do all that over Zoom.” 

One of the great failings of open-plan working has been the inability for people to focus on craft. So, in a strange way, the separation [from the office] from a craft point of view is helpful.

Unlike a lot of companies R/GA was already using Zoom, and with a staff that Pringle says are “pro-technology” the transition to a new way of working was maybe smoother than for others. That didn’t mean there was a remote-working set-up, and the idea of working from home was not one already entrenched within the agency, but staff fairly quickly adapted. 

But while the workforce readjusted without too much disruption, did the work itself? 

“One of the great failings of open-plan working,” says Pringle, “has been the inability for people to focus on craft. So, in a strange way, the separation [from the office] from a craft point of view is helpful because if you’re a designer and you want to sit and spend three hours just focussing on work, you can do that without anyone disturbing you, and that’s a wonderful thing. Of course, you have to balance that out with the collaborative nature of the office, because good ideas happen when people are brought together, but I think the cost/benefit of having a happier staff who have more flexibility, and more time to percolate on things outweighs the reduction of face-to-face collaboration. We didn’t see a drop in the quality of work and, if anything, the pure craft output got sharper.” 

Above: A benefit of home-based working has been the focus it allows. Open-plan offices haven't always been conducive to that, says Pringle.

Both Pringle and Bezzina admit that people do occasionally mourn the loss of “sitting in a room and putting stuff up on a wall”, but wonder if some of that loss is simply due to “muscle memory”, because that’s how they are used to working. Neither thinks that change of approach makes enough of a difference to demand that everyone now needs to come back to the office full time. 

The challenge they face as a leadership team is mitigating the disconnection some staff may feel when working remotely. They’ve had new starters, graduates, who began their careers over the pandemic who have never experienced office life and there are also people who don’t want to work from home all the time, or who don’t have an at-home set up that’s conducive to full-time remote working. “I think, increasingly, we’re seeing the office as a social place,” says Pringle. “A place for people to bond and connect. If you don’t do that then things are going to grind, and people feel ostracised and outside of the system.” 

No one’s really hybrid because their base is at home, that’s their anchor, not the office.

R/GA currently has two modes of working in place; one is a fully remote contract where you don’t come into the office unless you really want to, and this extends to people who may live abroad, or a long way outside the capital. The other is a hybrid approach or, as Bezzina refers to it, ‘homebrid’. “I stole that, actually,” she says, “from [R/GA Founder] Bob Greenberg. He says no one’s really hybrid because their base is at home, that’s their anchor, not the office. The only things we’ve mandated are the onboarding moment, so there’s a baseline physical connection when you start working here, and then our R/GA away days, which are every quarter, when we take a day out as an office to connect." Teams, the pair says, also have the freedom to self-organise, coming in on certain days to work together on a certain project, whereas some people come in three or four times per week. 

Above: Leaders who used fear as a tactic were already dying out, but the pandemic expedited that because working remotely meant more empathy and consideration was needed. 

I ask whether there’s a difference in adaptation to this new way of working between a company’s staff and its leadership team. Employees have more freedom and flexibility in their working lives now, which seems to be a positive for most, but has this approach made the task of managing and motivating people more difficult? “We all grew up in creative advertising where creativity was put on a pedestal,” says Pringle,  “and where the CD or ECD was at the head and you worked, in some cases, in abject fear [of them]. That fear is what drove results because people were terrified of being bad at their job. But while that was already dying out, the pandemic finally put it to bed because you couldn’t be like that; over Zoom that was not going to work, people would just check out. Humanity and empathy became critical and I think those leaders who are successful understand that.” 

Fear is what drove results because people were terrified of being bad at their job. But while that was already dying out, the pandemic finally put it to bed because you couldn’t be like that; over Zoom that was not going to work.

Two-and-a-half years on from the Covid-19 outbreak the world has, largely, returned to normal. But, aside from the altered working practices, is advertising the same as it always was or did the pandemic have a broader impact? “From a pure client point of view,” says Bezzina, “I think that almost none of our clients have gone back to full pre-pandemic levels, in terms of how their business is doing. And then, on top of that, there’s what’s going on in the economy. So, I don’t think we’ve seen that settle back to a norm. I think we’re still grappling with it, and some clients are reorganising themselves, some of them are reallocating what type of work they do. And I think that’s still going to take some time.” 

One thing that the pair wishes the pandemic had changed, but which largely remains the same, is the pitching process. “We’re stuck in this… let’s say nefarious… world of the pitch and the money we’re expected to spend,” says Pringle. “And there are 10 companies pitching for this piece of business, and then you look at the value of it and wonder if it’s really worth it. So, you might have thought that with the empathy that’s come through the business that might have passed onto how we pitch, and the value system we put in place when brands ask agencies to pitch. I think that process may have changed in places but, on the whole, it’s still the same and I think it’s still crippling agencies, big and small, because we are all runnning leaner than we’ve ever done.”