RGA's Michael Titshall: 'Diverse capabilities and cross-border collaboration give us a competitive edge'

With the recent news that IPG may be in talks to sell RGA, it's noteworthy that one of the geographies where the agency has been particularly successful is Australia.

Michael Titshall, a Campaign 40 under 40 winner in 2023 and the youngest CEO in the network (now 38 years old), has been the driving force behind RGA's growth for the last four and a half years. His success in Australia led to his promotion last December to lead RGA’s Asia Pacific operations as the new regional chief executive.

Over the past six months, Titshall has been working to replicate his success across the broader APAC region, making a slew of senior appointments and refining the agency's proposition to achieve those aims.

Campaign caught up with Titshall to discuss why he believes diverse capabilities and cross-border collaboration give the agency a competitive edge, how a significant drop in tech clients last year forced them to diversify, the sectors they are now focusing on, the overhype and concerns around AI, and his business predictions for the remainder of the year.

Note: This interview was conducted before the news of the potential sale was announced.

It's been six months since you took charge of RGA's Asia Pacific offerings. What have been the biggest changes and challenges you've overseen in that time?

 

The biggest challenge was finding a regional model that gives us a competitive advantage, but also provides the flexibility that enables each market to engage with their clients in the most relevant ways from a cultural, economic, and industry standpoint. It's involved making sure we've all got the same values, the same ambition, as well as a unified creative process at a high level, but then also empowering the local teams to have flexibility underneath that, to design their teams and their ways of working around their individual clients. We need to be designing that around our clients, because that's what's going to deliver them the most value. So, getting that balance right has been important. 

 

And then the other thing is making sure we're really interconnected in terms of how we work. We don't want to be siloed by departments or offices, but making sure we're pulling the right people based on the opportunity at hand, which can be a big change for people who have worked in more traditional agencies that are more hierarchical in how they work, as we have quite a flat organisational structure. 

 

You’ve recently overseen a number of new regional senior appointments and promotions in APAC—can you tell us a bit more about those appointments, and why now? 

 

Making sure we've got those key leadership roles has been the hardest thing. I wish I could just click a finger and find people in a day, but it takes three to six months to get the right people. I think we spent a lot of time back into last year just making sure we had a really clear proposition. RGA has always performed well at the intersection of creativity and technology, and I was hearing from clients that they wanted us to move with the times a bit more in that regard. So, all of our new appointments have been around that.

 

My first new appointment when I took on the CEO of APAC role was Lara Hewitt, who was promoted to executive director of talent and culture at the start of this year. This was all about better connecting our diverse talent across the region. Anthony Baker got promoted to managing director of Japan, which has seen great growth. He was previously a technical director, and so he's got a really different view around agency leadership. 

 

Our most recent appointment is Krishnan Menon, managing director of Southeast Asia. I've been searching for that role since the very end of last year. So, it took a while to find him. Krishnan was purposely selected not to lead just Singapore, but also Indonesia and Southeast Asia, combining deep technical capability in Indonesia, with the creative capability in Singapore. He has a breadth of experience across experienced tech, creative data, etc. All of the new appointments are purposely trying to bring forward our proposition that we're hearing clients asking us for. 

 

Tech-based clients in Asia Pacific dropped significantly by 39% last year for RGA—has any of that business come back? What’s your forecast with regards to tech clients? Are you pursuing other sectors instead?

 

Tech client business has come back, but not necessarily to the highs that we saw immediately post Covid. It feels like it's reached more sustainable levels. I don't really think about forecasts from a tech client perspective, it's probably similar to the rest of the market. It feels like it's going to be relatively flat in the short term, modest growth in the medium term into next year; we're not really seeing any bullish kind of budget increases for any sectors over the immediate term.

 

Did you anticipate that there might be more product innovation from some of the tech firms with a need to market those new products?

 

I think tech companies are continuing to invest in product development internally. Hence why they've redirected investment into that. I'm hoping by next year they will start to launch those product updates and some of the budget will swing back into marketing. But they hold their cap very close to their chests. If only I did know, I'd know exactly when I'd be a rich man!

 

Are you offsetting the losses from tech clients with other sectors?

 

I think you never know what's around the corner in any sector. So, the more diverse portfolio that we can have, the better. Auto clients, gaming and government/public services are some of the sectors that we're investing in. Finance is another sector that I'm hearing a lot about. They're really needing to connect with the next generation—that digital, native generation of Gen Z and below. And I think RGA is pretty well positioned and have done that across multiple markets in the world, helping established institutions modernise with younger generations. So, finance is an area that we'll continue to invest in.

 

 

How are you coping with AI innovation? Is it helping to increase revenue and reduce costs?

 

I think we're in a moment of overhype. Don't get me wrong, AI is going to have a transformational impact. But I do think people are just now working out the short term opportunity versus the longer term opportunity. The technology itself, IP, legal, and ethical issues, they all need to build up to have those big transformational impacts. 

 

We have worked on some AI projects that have been good from a revenue growth opportunity. Projects in the Gen AI space that we're helping our clients develop services, tools and models for that we wouldn't have got otherwise. What I'm seeing with those are that they're quite targeted in terms of the use cases and the benefits they provide. But I can see them becoming broader in terms of their impact on the organisation over time. As for improving efficiency, it's somewhat helped, especially in the engineering space. There are some creatives that like using AI in their process. It's another tool of insights to pull on. Overall, in terms of efficiency, it's been beneficial but it hasn't been significant.

 

Any fears or concerns about AI replacing or displacing the work you do?

 

I think, in the type of work that we do, I can't see that happening at all in the short term. I do think there's some really great opportunities to do automation of work where it's people doing lots of variations of communication rollout. For example, minor personalisations of that kind of high volume comms work. But that's just not the style of work that we do in terms of how we use experiences, technology, and campaigns in innovative ways to connect brands and people. Because it's more bespoke in that manner. And we don't have that long tail of comms rollout work like more traditional agencies, so the immediate impact of that doesn't feel as as high.

 

So your outlook on AI at the moment is mostly positive?

 

It's a positive outlook, but I would also be cautious in how we navigate it while not expecting it to change the world too quickly. There's a lot of ethical issues I'm really passionate about as well—things like using AI-generated imagery from a human perspective is really dangerous. You see the impact of social media on our younger generations already. And then you get these artificially developed human images, shaping expectations of what people should look like. I've got three young kids, and that scares the hell out of me. So, we've implemented codes of conduct for using AI in certain areas, not just from a legal perspective, but from an ethical perspective as well.

 

What do you currently see as the tension points hindering brands?

 

We've seen a lot of changes over the last couple of years, like full agency models, agency villages to fractional CMOs as the media landscape continues to get more and more fragmented. I think historically, you'd have an agency village where they've got specific partners who look after specific channels. But we need to think more about how people are engaging with brands through a really different ecosystem of channels, and we need to be led by their behaviours with that sector or that brand, to come up with what the best marketing output is. And so what we've tried to do across APAC is make sure we've got a consistent overarching process for creative development, one that works more like a studio. So, put diverse capability around it to solve the problem, rather than make it work in a linear process that goes from strategy to creative to execution. What that allows is more diverse thinking from the beginning to get to more, not channel-led thinking, but rather just the best output for the customer.

 

In terms of the diverse capability that you mention, how easy has it been to get that diversity of talent?

 

We've got one profit and loss across APAC, and local MDs have KPIs not just in the revenue they deliver but what they actually share across office. They are incentivised to share work—what that means is that a client can get access across the whole pool of RGA in APAC, not just access to capability, but people with different experiences, different cultural understandings, different sector experience, which gets you to different places and different thinking. I see that kind of cross geographic borders model being beneficial to clients, because they get access to more diversity, but also beneficial to our talent, because they get access to more opportunities.

 

You mention the diversity of talent challenge—some say that DE&I is moving down adland's agenda and it's become deprioritised as other challenges have arisen. Do you see this happening?

 

I do think there's probably been a reduction in people outwardly speaking about DEI in terms of what's out in the press, but this doesn't necessarily change the actions and decisions people are making internally. The economic conditions of the last couple of years haven't been great, and so people have probably been focused in their outward projections to be more on business generating kind of topics, more so than DEI topics. But I hope that doesn't mean it's gone down the importance at all. The amount of initiatives we're doing, and the investment we're doing continues to grow, year-on-year. And it's still really important to talent. It's not like it's going down the importance list to them. So, I still think it's an imperative to make sure you're attracting and retaining the best people.

 

Sustainability is also something that appears to have slipped down adland's agenda, as many feel the ad industry is focused on growth at all costs. As an agency leader do you think the industry can reconcile growth and climate crisis objectives?

 

The biggest way to reconcile the two is to make sure that you're working with clients and brands that are having a positive impact or positively trying to address the climate change crisis, rather than just the dance. We declined a potentially big commercial opportunity because the client didn't align with our values from a sustainability perspective. And I think there's a lot of agencies out there that wouldn't work with fossil fuels companies. At least I hope they wouldn't. I think there's positive output in terms of getting people to be swayed towards more climate conscious brands. Who you're working with is probably the biggest impact that we can have as an industry to be honest.

 

Are you confident that you're going to market with a strong point of differentiation? 

 

Yes, I believe our modelling and how we operate across the region differentiates us. And it's the fact that we don't just think about creative in the same way that's been executed before. As we go through relatively difficult times, clients are needing to do things differently to get more value for their marketing spend. I'm confident in terms of discussions I've had with our clients that they're looking for that and we've got the capability to deliver on it.

 

Is that to be able to mould yourself to the individual needs of the client?

 

I think we have to design our offerings around each of our clients' needs to be relevant for them. I'm hearing a lot from clients that they need to connect their brand with people in new ways, because this broadcast-down approach to branding doesn't work anymore, but we need to have that emotional connection as well with people. How that comes to life in different sectors is totally different. For finance, someone that you might use an app with every day is totally different to a gaming company, which is different to an insurance company who you don't interact with that often. So, we definitely need to change our approaches with each of them. But I think the ingredients of what they need, in terms of how do we connect with people in new channels and through new technology habits remains constant.

 

And are clients mostly looking for flexible agency partnerships?

 

I don't see the big full agency retainer opportunities out there, they are definitely more flexible. However, clients do want some consistency because the brand knowledge operational-wise is important. I continue to see our industry is moving more and more towards a project basis with the client. If you do a good job on that project, you get the next project. So, it's in your hands. There's still ongoing client relationships, it's not like you do one project and 'I'll see you later'. I think it's needed because if you have the same team, it's the same skill sets retained on a business, you're gonna get the same outputs over time. I think it leads to better work, which is better for everyone.