Well, in the world of digital marketing and tech innovation R/GA is a name that get attention! After my appearance in Forbes Magazine, here you can read my BIZ Magazine interview I gave a while back.
Starting in April 2014, Ana-Maria Bogdan, ex-Grapefruit, is the new General Manager of R/GA Bucharest, part of The Interpublic Group. She shared with us how she was recruited by one of the world’s most award-winning and creative full-service digital agencies and the first projects she is overseeing from the Bucharest office.
Loredana Săndulescu: Tell us about how you came to be the General Manager of R/GA Romania. What were the steps in the hiring process?
I didn’t seek out this change; rather, it found me. Ever since I started working in the digital industry, R/GA has been a benchmark agency for me, whose consistently innovative and award-winning projects inspired us to create and propose increasingly ambitious initiatives locally as well. So, when I was approached by R/GA, I felt extremely honored and saw it as recognition of all the efforts I’d made over nearly 15 years to help grow this industry in one way or another.
R/GA team had been looking for someone to fill the position of General Manager in Romania since the branch opened in 2012. However, the process was a long one, because they took their time to find someone with a background and experience in the digital field who would fit both their organizational culture and environment, as well as the type of projects they develop in general.
For R/GA, the choice of the first General Manager was extremely important—crucial, I would say—with a major impact on the future of the local office. Over 300 applications for the General Manager position were considered.
LS: R/GA announced its presence in Romania at the end of 2012. What is the agency’s current position in the Romanian market?
The Romanian branch is dedicated to working on R/GA’s international projects—at the moment, we are not carrying out projects for local clients. Currently, the Bucharest office functions largely as a “tech studio”, collaborating with international teams to implement and support R/GA clients in the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We have highly skilled and talented professionals in the technology field, with expertise that meets international standards. I would also add that there are a few other extremely important common traits among all team members—competitiveness understood as a desire to excel, a constant openness to learning, initiative, and team spirit. These are extremely important factors that we specifically look for during the recruitment process.
The agency has a unique approach to work, consisting of a collaborative and highly efficient model. Resource allocation is done on a global level, taking into account numerous factors, including availability, with a focus on achieving the best possible match between specialists’ skills and the type of project, previous experience working on similar projects, and professional goals related to learning new technologies.
LS: Who are the first clients in R/GA Bucharest’s portfolio?
R/GA Bucharest does not work for clients in the Romanian market. The projects on which the Bucharest team is working are for clients with a regional or global presence, such as L’Oréal, Turkcell, or Nokia. In reality, however, the list of these clients is much longer, but as is often the case in this industry, confidentiality agreements prevent me from disclosing these names
LS: And what about the service portfolio?
It is no longer a secret that the extremely rapid evolution of various technologies is driving sometimes major changes in consumer behavior. Hence the need for agencies to be in a constant state of learning, adapting, and streamlining their own processes. From this perspective, R/GA is a practical example of the new agency model centered on the ever-changing interplay between strategy, creativity, and technology.
It is no coincidence that R/GA has successfully implemented many groundbreaking projects, as evidenced by the numerous awards it has won for brands such as Mastercard, O2, Verizon, Beats by Dr. Dre, Nike, Google, Rexona, Getty Images, and others.
With each of its projects, R/GA has sought to transform the way people relate to and interact with brands. Consequently, connecting consumers with brands often requires blurring the lines as much as possible between advertising, product and software development, PR, and other related disciplines. In this context, at a global level, R/GA covers the full range of services typical of any digital agency—consulting, strategy, digital advertising, mobile development, e-commerce, social media, brand development, etc. What sets it apart, however, is the development of dedicated departments or divisions such as Prototype Studio, Product Innovation, Data Visualization, R/GA Retail Lab, and Software Platform Lab.
For example, the Software Platform Lab division was recently launched in New York and supports clients faced with the decision of choosing the most suitable technical solutions, whether we’re talking about CMS, e-commerce platforms, CRM, Analytics, Social, Mobile, Testing, Retail, Data, or infrastructure. It’s the kind of decision that can make a major difference between success and failure, whether viewed from the perspective of costs or concrete business results. This is something I say with full knowledge of the facts, well aware of how difficult this process can be—throughout my career, I have been in a similar position for clients in Romania, where I built e-business departments and, by extension, developed or integrated such solutions as needed. The role of this team is to simplify decision-making by guiding clients through the process of researching, evaluating, selecting, and integrating third-party technology solutions.
The fact that R/GA benefits from over 100 partnerships with various solution providers covering 12 verticals, while not acting as a reseller, ensures the highest degree of objectivity and neutrality. And I cannot talk about the Software Platform Lab without mentioning that this initiative is the brainchild of a Romanian, Isabel Kantor, who has built a successful career at R/GA’s New York office. She is the one that fusrt came up with the idea of opening of the R/GA office in Bucharest
LS: How large is the team at this stage?
Currently, the R/GA Bucharest team consists of 11 experts organized into two departments: Development and Quality Assurance. Our intention, in the medium and long term, is to grow these departments and expand the range of services offered to R/GA’s regional offices.
Very briefly, we are currently conducting interviews for the position of HR/Office Manager. We will soon begin the recruitment process for positions such as Quality Assurance, Open Standards Developer, .Net Developer, Python Developer, Mobile Developer (iOS and Android), and Design Studio Manager.
LS: What are your goals for this year?
As a member of the R/GA Executive Committee, alongside all the other general managers and key decision-makers at the department level, I’ll be contributing to the agency’s global development strategy, as well as to some major internal projects.
NOTE:
The original article appeared in BIZ Magazine on May 13, 2014.
