The Cresta Interview: Bob Greenberg

Imagine rebuilding your business every few years.

Imagine deliberately moving the focus away from what you are known for and successful with, so as to place a big bet on the new. 

Ceaseless reinvention is what being creative is all about, isn't it? And yet creative industries are often highly conventional in sticking to what they think they know best. 

Fewer still risk radical change as they get older, or if the business is a multinational part of a multinational conglomerate, accountable to many and for many. 

But Bob Greenberg is an exception. R/GA, the enterprise he has led or co-lead for 42 years, stands apart as a creative business like no other. He started it with his brother Richard, both of them working and often sleeping in a tiny studio while crafting an output that transformed film graphics and technology — from breakthrough work in 1978 on Superman, and going on to be pioneers of CGI in Hollywood for more than a decade, picking up an Academy Award along the way. Then that was turned into standout productions as a broader digital studio, with thousands of high-end commercials and more feature work. The arrival of the world wide web prompted radical redirection into making the future happen in a new way, with a commitment to becoming an interactive advertising agency before there was such a thing. It paid off. in the late 1990s the business was sold to True North, which then became part of Interpublic. But R/GA never lost its own identity: instead it has remade that identity time after time.