Basking in reflected glory

I'm generally a bit painfully averse to the big agency hagiography that goes on in that particular world, but I was actually quite struck that R/GA was voted as one of the "30 most iconic companies in internet history" according to the Webby awards.

I spent 5 years at R/GA, from early 2011 to the end of 2015, and looking at that list of 30 genuinely big huge names it's quite striking company to be in.

None of the projects I worked on directly are in the list of examples posted — sadly I never got to work on any of the "glory" projects cough Nike cough — but they nevertheless represent big global names — Goldman Sachs, Aston Martin, BBC, Google, Unilever, and McDonalds to namedrop just a few.

R/GA displayed an amazing capacity to attract amazing, talented people (and me) and built a model of collaboration that brought them together in interesting ways. That's due in no small part to Bob Greenberg's somewhat restless nature and the strategy of deliberate reinvention — originally every 9 years, but more rapidly of late, particularly with the recent exit from holding company ownership — which unshackled it from the less desirable tendency to "be successful, get bigger doing the same thing, get stale, get eaten by the next big thing coming along".

As much as I don't generally go in for the "ooh, look at me - I worked for a big agency, don't you know!" pomposity, it's certainly nice to be able to bask in some (somewhat) reflected glory every now and then...