Nick’s Law Of Being Dynamic

Though he says his early career was all about following women rather than trends, Nick Law, global chief communications officer at R/GA, is now fully focussed on eyeing up new innovations that keep the digital agency constantly evolving. Sarah Shearman chats to him about systems, software and the relief of a good story

Nick Law, global chief communications officer at R/GA says he has never had a plan, so it’s somewhat fitting that his career path, which he describes as having been “idiosyncratic”, has led him to a company that refuses to sit still.

Since 2001 Law has shaped the creative vision for an agency known as a shape-shifter that pumps bleeding-edge interactive work. For him it all started with a T-square. Training as a graphic designer in his hometown of Sydney before the advent of desktop publishing, Law moved from design into branding, advertising and interactive, travelling first to London then NYC and Atlanta.

For the first 20 years of his career, Law didn’t stay in one place for more than two years. But he says it was his unusual breadth of expertise that landed him the job at R/GA twelve years ago. “It was complete luck, and nothing to do with a grand plan, mainly because I was chasing women around the world,” he says.

R/GA was founded by Bob and Richard Greenberg in 1977, creating groundbreaking visual effects for movies such as Superman, Alien, Predator and Se7en. While countless companies have been unable to stay afloat during technological tide-change, R/GA’s ability to align and adapt has ensured its success over the years. “The simplest way to explain the changes is that we have become more important as the stuff we are doing has become more important – because the internet won.” But R/GA hasn’t changed purely to keep up, insists Law. “We are reinventing because we believe the model is better.”

CEO and chairman Bob Greenberg was once described by Fast Company magazine as a ‘Generation Fluxer’, one of the pioneers of the new (and chaotic) frontier of business. He sums up R/GA’s current state of being as a mixture of an agency, a products and services company and a consultancy. Law elaborates on this: “Once you start building service software, you are building businesses, not just doing communications. You’re changing models through service and you need to have conversations with more than just the CMO.”

Staying true to the dance

What has remained a constant at the agency is the “dance between the arts and science” says Law. He references the “beautiful and technical achievement” of the Superman visuals as an example of how the agency has remained true to this heritage over the years.

From a leadership point of view, all this change means that Law has gone from “doing one thing to doing everything”. When he first joined, creatives would produce web pages to show him in interviews. But now he will interview anyone from classic copywriters to computer graphics artists. “We have [a wealth] of creative aptitude, working in different ways,” he says. “So part of the creative leadership challenge is not just recognising and curating teams for specific problems, it’s choreographing that talent so you’ve got people doing the right thing at the right time.”

Law’s creative team is divided between the storytelling component and the systematic part. “The systematic people offer possibilities and the storyteller offers simplicity. As soon as you divorce those two, things get out of balance and you don’t have innovation. I try to straddle both domains, which means there is always someone better at both sides,” he says. 

So R/GA doesn’t fit neatly into any agency category definition. But it is apparent that this softly-spoken Aussie seems more than comfortable with R/GA’s not-your-typical-ad-agency status. It is not that the industry hasn’t embraced R/GA – any visitor to its Hells Kitchen office would immediately be aware of the impressive array of trophies that dominate the reception’s walls. Indeed Law has won every major industry award going, including a Titanium Lion and Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes and a Black Pencil from D&AD. “We’ve done well at Cannes because the industry recognises this sort of stuff is important,” he says.

Through its long-standing relationship with Nike, R/GA has been able to push the creative boundaries (as well as picking up loads of awards along the way) on the brand’s transformation from apparel to digital sports. While Nike is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to discussing its marketing, it has bestowed great praise on R/GA for its work. From the popular Nike+ Training app to customisable footwear, Nike and R/GA’s most recent noteworthy work is in the world of wearable tech with FuelBand, which measures and relays the wearer’s activity throughout the day. Law says the idea for FuelBand came about over a long period and through many different sources, along with the help of R/GA’s experience in both design and middleware, ie. software that connects two otherwise separate applications. 

Resolutely on-brand, Law is a keen runner and fan of the quantified self movment, in which self-tracking data, gathered via wearable sensors and computing, is used to improve daily physical and mental functioning. Sporting a FuelBand he says he got back into running through a ‘biggest-loser’-style weight-loss competition at work. It was a combination of tracking body data and his competitive streak that led him to victory.

Cocktails on the Croisette

Nike+ is the perfect example of what Law describes as “earned data”, referring to data in the same way as media: paid, owned and earned. Instead of seeing data collection as a means of making advertising better, Law says earned data presents an even greater opportunity for brands. “If you create platforms that people want to use and collect that data for them, then not only is the exchange more human, but it isn’t interruptive and is gathered when they are doing something they want,” he says.

A few years ago, Law assumed the industry might follow its lead into the realm of interactive and software design, after R/GA won lots of awards for its Nike+ work. The years 2005 and 2006 were a “watershed”, when the industry realised it was in more than just the advertising business, says Law. He says this “giddy optimism” for software production has since evaporated, after it became apparent how hard this sort of work is to create and maintain. “Agencies with strong client relationships sold these ideas thinking they would be as easy to produce as a TV script, but the software has to be good enough to beat the other software,” he explains.

But it is not that Law thinks the 30-second spot has become irrelevant, rather the budgets assigned to TV [have dwindled]. “Now everything changes so quickly and is so complicated.”

However he does believe that despite diversification of platforms, there has been a kind of return to the basics. Law illustrates this point by discussing last year’s Cannes Festival. The big winners in digital, such as McCann Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die for Metro Trains and Leo Burnett Sydney’s Small World Machines for Coca-Cola are both essentially narrative pieces, signifying how agencies’ endeavours in digital have returned to what they do best – storytelling.

“The pendulum has swung back to this more comfortable place and there is a strange sense of relief.” He paints the scene of ad executives enjoying cocktails on the Croisette handed to them by the likes of Facebook, Yahoo and Google. “The industry has in some ways surrendered that [software production] to Silicon Valley,” he says. For R/GA it’s the Valley that poses the greatest threat in the talent wars, with staff more likely to be poached by the tech giants or join startups than head to traditional agencies.

Stimulated by startups

Law is a believer in drawing inspiration from outside the world of advertising. “All patterns that are happening in the world are reflected in our industry, so food for thought for me doesn’t come just from advertising.”

A recent notable source of inspiration is the tech industry. R/GA has teamed up with startup accelerator TechStars to launch the R/GA Connected Devices Accelerator, to mentor startups that are developing connected mobile apps, hardware and products, including everything from wearable tech and sensor-laden gadgets to 3D printing, home automation gear and beyond. Housed in the agency’s New York office, the startups will benefit from R/GA’s expertise in design, branding and marketing.

It’s clear that Law’s day job involves juggling many complexities, but he is committed to taking the agency in whatever exciting directions the future dictates. He enjoys his work so much that he sees no separation between his career and life outside the office. He can’t comprehend playing a round of golf or joining the rest of the USA in getting hooked on watching Breaking Bad. “Who’s got time for that? Oscar Wilde said ‘nothing succeeds like success’. And that may not always be healthy, but I think it’s true,” he says.