Reinventing the Reel

By: Danielle SacksWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:24 AM

The phrase "interactive advertising" is everywhere. Bob Greenberg actually makes it.

Brut Force Bob Greenberg at his office in Hell's Kitchen. His collection of "art brut" is now worth millions.

Virtual Milestone R/GA's Web site creates an interactive world for runners using a sensor-equipped Nike+ sneaker and an iPod. More than 1,000 runners are signing on daily.

2007 Masters of Design

“I'm down to 13 pairs," confesses Bob Greenberg, pulling a couple dusty boxes of Armani glasses off a shelf in his office. In the 1990s, he says, he hoarded 25 pairs of the moon-shaped specs when he learned they were being discontinued. Obsessive? Maybe. But anyone with Greenberg's foresight can be forgiven for wanting to keep his focus.

Today, the founder of R/GA, who with his stem-thin legs and partial penumbra of gray hair resembles a dandelion ravaged by wind, runs Madison Avenue's most creative interactive advertising agency. Drawing on the technical ingenuity of a geek, the curatorial instincts of a gallery owner, and the rambling curiosity of a perpetual film student, Greenberg has built an operation that defines what interactive advertising is capable of--and what it can do for business. He and his team design experiences, from the underlying concept itself to the software code that frames it to, in some cases, the very hardware that delivers it. Unlike most creative directors, who master a single craft, the Ducati-driving Greenberg bridges the technical, the imaginative, and the utilitarian to revolutionize the way advertising penetrates our brains.

Few in the field recognized the implications of the Web earlier than Greenberg. And with his peers still scrambling to tap that potential--with decidedly mixed results--it's little wonder R/GA took home nearly every premium award in the past year: a Black Pencil at the UK's prestigious D&AD Awards; a Titanium Lion at the Cannes advertising festival; and best in show at the International Andy Awards, as the first digital work to win the category. According to Adweek, which anointed R/GA "Interactive Agency of the Year" for 2006, the company's revenues grew 33%, to $91million, with clients such as Nokia and Johnson & Johnson, and lured new brands including L'Oréal and Discover Card. But Greenberg was most gratified by R/GA's inclusion in Advertising Age's annual "A-list," alongside heavy hitters such as BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi. "Two years ago, they wouldn't even consider us an ad agency," he says. "Now we're the only digital agency in the group."

For its first 18 years, in fact, R/GA wasn't an ad agency at all. In the late 1970s, Greenberg and his brother opened R/Greenberg Associates, a production house that made special effects for movies such as Alien, Superman, and Predator. While most of the movie business was fretting that computers would undermine film, Greenberg, now R/GA's CEO and global chief creative officer, found the machines freed him to experiment and innovate much faster. "We designed a lot of the equipment, so we could create things nobody else had seen or done before," he says. The brothers retooled old Disney animation cameras, even cameras designed for the military, becoming one of the first shops to put computers at the center of the production process. In the 1980s, they built one of the first integrated digital studios--film, video, and computer graphics, all under one roof--and were soon making iconic commercials such as the Diet Coke spot in which Paula Abdul danced with Gene Kelly, or the Reebok bit where Shaq shot hoops against 10 6-foot-5 clones of himself. By the early 1990s, R/GA had carved out a name as the "Lucasfilm of the East," earned an Academy Award for technical achievement, and produced work for 400 feature films and 4,000 commercials.

When his brother left R/GA in the mid-1990s, Greenberg decided to turn the shop into an ad agency. The Internet was beginning to remap the landscape, and he sensed that film-based industries were on their way to extinction, with the 30-second spot close behind them. He decided to put digital at the agency's core, a move most ad agencies wouldn't consider for another decade--but which felt completely natural to Greenberg.

While he's clearly a visually charged guy (he embraces his fetishes for his jet-black Comme des Garçons wardrobe, for example, and for the minimalist architecture of Mies van der Rohe), Greenberg has a Rain Man-like relationship to numbers, a fact that has both pained and inspired him. "My grammar- and high-school years were pretty tough because I couldn't add," he says in a vestigial Chicago accent. It wasn't until he was 35 that he was finally diagnosed with severe dyslexia, which he suspects gave him his intuitive ability to quickly recognize patterns, decipher software, and interpret data. "That probably has something to do with my ability to understand and see things a bit differently. It's a core part of what happened in my life."