Stepping into R/GA's New York headquarters, a visitor notices, amid the general bustle of a busy shop, the beautiful, sometimes haunting images on the walls.

They are pieces from Bob Greenberg's personal collection of "outsider art," created by the institutionalized. "What I find in outsider art is the opposite of what I find in the digital world: no compromise and complete expressive freedom," Greenberg wrote about the collection, in a book published a decade ago.

Indeed, Greenberg's choice of art is the inverse of how, in his own idiosyncratic way, he has crafted R/GA's place in the evolving world of brand building. Rather than pursue the kind of singular creative representations that dominate traditional advertising, the 60-year-old R/GA founder and CEO has thrown the agency headlong into a collaborative process that results in integrated digital platforms for clients. His vision of skipping the typical attention -- getting advertising in favor of utility has helped the shop establish longstanding relationships with top companies like Nike, Nokia and Verizon -- and makes a credible case that he is building a better agency model with technology at the core.

"There's a couple different directions agencies will have to take," says Greenberg. "There's a difference between us and someone like Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We've taken the direction of building brand platforms rather than viral stunts or one-off things."

In a year when even digital agencies began to feel the pinch of a declining economy, R/GA plowed ahead, adding Hewlett-Packard, Mars and HBO as clients, and growing revenue by 20 percent to $126 million. As others scaled back, the Interpublic Group shop beefed up its London outpost to account for 10 percent of total revenue and opened in San Francisco in a bid to grab digital talent.For its financial performance and its continued success in proving the power of brand platforms rooted in utility, R/GA is Adweek's Digital Agency of the Year for 2008 -- its fourth such honor in the past eight years.

THE PROMISE OF PLATFORMS
There was a time when R/GA was accused of being little more than a Flash sweatshop, offering clients an army of Web designers to pump out campaign microsites. While Greenberg would rail against the primacy of the TV commercial -- he was once dubbed the "30-second spot remover" by The New York Times -- critics pointed out that R/GA's immersive brand sites looked a lot like TV ads online.

Yet Greenberg's vision of building customer relationships through inbound attention is now being realized as many brands sour on the interruptive ad model. The key, as Greenberg has long and frequently advocated, is technology, which enables forward-thinking companies to build systems that attract and retain customers while weaving marketing and product together.

"We're looking at customer behavior and seeing how to create something bigger than a TV spot or print ad," says Greenberg, an architecture buff.

Exhibit A remains Nike+, introduced in 2006, but still evolving, which links the Apple iPod and Nike shoes to enable people to track and share their runs online. Nike+ is not a typical advertising idea dreamed up by a copywriter and an art director. It is the result of a deep collaboration among teams.

Systems aren't built on the back of napkins. Nike tapped R/GA to make the crucial link between a chip in a running shoe and a social-networking Web interface. For a complex product, the Web experience had to be seamless. And while it is different than watching a beautifully crafted TV spot, the feeling one gets after plugging in one's iPod and seeing one's running data uploaded and displayed on NikePlus.com is perhaps more powerful. Nike and R/GA saw it as not just a product, but as a system stemming from behavior. Runners track their mileage and enjoy listening to music -- what they were missing was a way to combine the two and connect with each other.

With a relationship dating to 2001 -- a lifetime in the interactive world -- Nike and R/GA are deeply enmeshed. "We have people on the ground at Nike," says Nick Law, chief creative officer for North America at R/GA. "We have deep technical relationships with them."

That's yielded a system that turns the advertising equation on its head. Unlike advertising that is bound by the start and end date of a campaign, a platform offers a constant connection that can be added to. Nike and R/GA collaborated on The Human Race, a 10-kilometer running event held in 25 cities worldwide on Aug. 31. Thanks to Nike+, Nike had a ready-built media platform to recruit and connect participants, and set up city and country challenges. Consumers could compete virtually using their Nike+ systems. And the digital platform also informed how Nike marketed the event.



Since its launch, challenges are among the most popular uses of Nike+, so Nike positioned the 10K as a way for cities and groups to challenge each other. R/GA created teaser videos with celebrities along this theme, while the site let users join their own teams to challenge each other. R/GA added other elements, including an application that allowed runners to personalize copies of a Human Race commemorative book with their own photos.

More than 780,000 people in 142 countries participated in the race. What's remarkable is how this was accomplished largely without paid media. Nike spent just $450,000 on media for Nike+ in all of 2008, per TNS.

"The huge opportunity is bridging the gap between the physical and the digital worlds," says Stefan Olander, global director of digital media at Nike. "We view it not just as a marketing tool, but as a service to athletes. If we do that well, we don't have to do that much with traditional marketing."

Nike+ is just the start. One of the crucial aspects of R/GA's work in 2008 was to make real the promise of blurring the physical and digital worlds. This is an old quest for the digital industry and has, for the most part, come up empty over the years. Not so anymore. Take NikeiD. When it rolled out in 2003, it was thought to be an interesting piece of technology -- a way to customize shoes. But again, the technology became an expanding system. First, it moved to an interactive billboard in Times Square. Next, R/GA expanded the platform to Niketown stores. In the U.K., it expanded from customizable shoes to soccer uniforms, letting a person outfit an entire team from an in-store kiosk.

Similarly, R/GA expanded longtime client Verizon's in-store sales kiosks from a handful of locations to 3,000 nationwide. Salespeople use the touch-screen displays to give customers in-depth information on products and calling plans. In effect, it brings the Web experience and the retail location together.

"Software is a medium," says John Mayo-Smith, R/GA chief technology officer. "Having people who understand software and a high-quality user experience is really important."

The key to these platforms is that they sell products directly, rather than tell stories about them. In the case of Nike+, the proof is in the numbers. Since its debut, runners have logged 100 million miles worldwide. Most important, the company's global running-shoe sales are up from $8 billion for the fiscal year ending May 2006 to $9.7 billion for the year ending May 2008, a 21 percent increase. Market share has gone from 48 percent in the U.S. in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008, according to SportsOneSource.



APPS NOT ADS
Greenberg has long been an unfailing advocate of creativity in digital media-and vice versa. For many years, however, the notion of digital creativity has been in flux. It became synonymous with flat Web sites and banner ads. Greenberg saw something different: He saw technology forming a new kind of creativity that relied less on the metaphors of talking animals in TV spots and more on brands connecting people. If the "traditional" notion of digital creativity is the hot viral video, Greenberg counters with an application that uses data in a new way to help people live better.

"We want to create transformational experiences that are either so useful or so compelling that they change consumers' relationship with the brand," says Barry Wacksman, R/GA's chief growth officer. "We saw the industry chasing more gimmicky stuff. That's great, but it's not transformational."

Nowhere is that more critical than in the newest digital frontier: mobile. While mobile ad networks sprang up to put miniaturized banners on people's cell phones, the personalized nature of the device and platforms like the iPhone are fertile ground for providing utility rather than more interruption.

The key to apps: tech chops. "Urbanista Diaries" was an interactive push that showed off the Nokia N82's GPS technology and top-notch camera in action through a campaign. With most ad pushes, the story would end there. But R/GA's London office worked with Nokia to develop the technology behind the "Urbanista Diaries" Web site into a user application for N82 users. The result: Nokia viNe, a mobile application that lets users tag places with notes, photos, music and videos that are then displayed in a streaming vine. It ties location to the current vogue, seen in services like Twitter, for broadcasting daily activities.

The shift to utility is a major push for Nike, which sees more benefit in providing utility to customers in digital spaces than in broadcasting messages to them there, according to Olander. Nike's Ballers Network is the kernel of an idea that could grow into a full-fledged platform. The Facebook application lets basketball players connect with each other to find pick-up games and manage their leagues. A mobile site extends the capability.

"We figured the kids that need this the most are on the go," says Rich Ting, head of R/GA's mobile and emerging media practice. "We're not just building a stand-alone Web site."

This expertise in platforms that goes beyond the Web is leading brands to R/GA, which wants to change the way they approach digital channels. In 2008 HBO brought on R/GA to help craft its digital strategy. Hewlett-Packard gave R/GA's San Francisco outpost an anchor client with the charge of bringing innovation to its digital strategy. The upside of such assignments: They come from a high level at the organizations, which is key for digital agencies looking for parity with more well-established traditional shops.

"They understand the Web, engagement on the Web and e-commerce," says Michael Mendenhall, CMO of HP. "But they also understand advanced TV, mobile and all the other touch points that are part of the digital ecosystem."



A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE
At first glance, the soft-spoken Greenberg appears to be an unrepentant idealist. Yet underneath the mellow exterior, he has a shrewd knack for holding his own in the inevitable agency knife fights that happen, particularly when budgets are in flux. Over the years, R/GA has clawed and scratched its way to high-level relationships with marketers rather than being relegated to the lower rungs where most digital shops find themselves. He advises Barnes & Noble's top executives, Len and Stephen Riggio, and boasts CMO-level relationships at HP, Avaya and S.C. Johnson.

That makes a difference, says Wacksman. "These traditional ad agencies are realizing their businesses are threatened," he says.

Entry to the executive suite also has given Greenberg an opportunity to sell his religion: that agencies must have technology at the core to help clients navigate the new world of digital media. While traditional shops might thrive in creating the hot viral video of the day, he preaches, they will fall short when it comes to building sustainable brand platforms and useful applications that blur product and marketing. That even applies to a shop like Crispin. When it comes to the core of Nike+, "they couldn't even have the conversation," Greenberg says.

Clients listen. "They are one of the only agencies that has a terrific creative team [and] the technical expertise to engage in discussions about architecture and applications with an IT company," says Mendenhall.

With its tech core, R/GA continued building out its model in 2008, adding a brand design practice led by Marc Shillum, formerly a creative director at TBWA. It also added a digital advertising practice and beefed up analytics, a critical area in the current downturn, when clients will scrutinize ever more closely what is making a difference for them.

A key area for the model Greenberg envisions is production, a discipline in which R/GA began its existence back in 1977. While most agencies rely on outside production, R/GA has kept its in-house. In 2008, revenue from the 30-person production facility grew by more than 300 percent compared to 2007. The digital studio shot over 250 video projects during the year, working for R/GA clients and other agencies and firms.

R/GA's take on the future of video: It will be ubiquitous and must be done at a much lower price point than typical commercial production. Greenberg also thinks the industry is seeing the start of the decline of the metaphor. While brands are used to explaining their products through metaphors for what they do, savvy consumers will increasingly ignore that in favor of product demonstrations, says Greenberg, who cites the breakthrough work TBWA has done for Apple's iPhone with commercials that show the product's features.

R/GA is at work doing just this. For Nike Sparq, R/GA created more than 60 training videos dedicated to football, basketball, soccer and women. The videos can then be mixed online to create customized training programs, available for download to mobile devices. Strung together, the how-to videos become like a virtual trainer in the real world.

Writing a decade ago, Greenberg had this vision: "I don't believe we can successfully live in two worlds, one electronic, one personal. The digital takes over."