The New Wave ~ Rethink Everything
The New Wave is Campaign Brief’s Q&A series spotlighting the next generation of independent creative companies and exploring how the indie model is evolving. From structure and speed to culture and capability, we unpack where these businesses are finding their edge and what’s driving client decisions today. Next up is Mike Spirkovski, Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Rethink Everything.
Give us the elevator pitch. Who are you and what do you do?
Our name says a lot about how we work. Everything is up for grabs and everything is on the table.
The problems we get thrown at us can range from protecting heritage and safeguarding ancient culture, to fighting for cheaper energy and Australian jobs, helping rethink policies that aren’t working, or asking thousands of people to help protect nature.
No two problems are the same, so neither are the answers. Sometimes creativity leads to a campaign, sometimes it takes us into policy, corporate affairs, government relations, technology, behaviour change or somewhere we hadn’t considered when we started.
That’s what keeps it interesting. We don’t begin with what we’re going to make, we begin with what we’re trying to solve.
For us, it’s been a move from making ads to making change.
Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
Like most change, what feels new at first eventually becomes normal, and I think independents are normal now.
There are great independents everywhere doing great work for significant clients, so simply being independent isn’t particularly interesting anymore. What you do with that independence is.
For us, it’s the freedom to follow a problem wherever it takes us. We don’t have to turn it into an advertising brief or find an answer that fits the capabilities we happen to have, which means we can keep pulling it apart, bring different people into the room and follow the thinking until we find something that might actually change things.
What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
The obvious answers are that we’re smaller, faster, more agile and senior people actually do the work, but that’s true of most good independents, so I’m not sure it’s much of an unfair advantage anymore.
For us, it’s probably the freedom to choose the problems we want to work on, and then choose the right people to put around them.
When you’re part of a large network, you don’t always get to choose the work that comes through the door or the people available to solve it. We can. It means we can be selective about the problems we take on and build a completely different team around each one.
How often do you have a creative, a corporate affairs and public relations expert, a policy adviser, a government relations specialist, a carbon economist, a former diplomat and a former government minister sitting around the same table trying to solve a problem? That’s a pretty normal day for us.
These are people who wouldn’t ordinarily work together, but that’s precisely the point. The problems we work on don’t belong neatly to one discipline, so neither should the thinking that goes into solving them.
Everything’s up for grabs, everything’s on the table, and so is everyone who might help solve it.
How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
If anything, AI has given us acceleration. The demands on businesses like ours had already become pretty extraordinary, with more work, more iterations and more information to get through, usually with less time to do it, and AI has helped rebalance some of that.
It gives us a bit more gas and means we spend less time in the weeds, which leaves more time for the bigger things that actually need our attention. We use it every day and it’s incredibly useful, but I don’t think AI itself is an unfair advantage because everyone has access to it.
What you do with it, and knowing what’s worth doing in the first place, still comes down to judgement.
What kind of clients are choosing indies right now, and why?
It’s difficult to generalise because independents can be very different businesses. We can really only talk about the clients who come to us, and they’re often dealing with something they genuinely need to solve rather than simply looking for an agency to make something.
Sometimes there’s a brief and sometimes there isn’t. It might be a policy that isn’t working, an issue people don’t understand, a behaviour that needs to change, a reputation under pressure or a business problem that has become a public one. Quite often the first job is simply working out what the problem really is and who needs to be around the table to solve it.
That’s probably why independence works so well for us. We’re not particularly invested in what the answer looks like or where it comes from, which gives us the freedom to follow the problem wherever it takes us and find the thing that might actually change something.
What’s next: growth, staying lean, or something else?
Hopefully, better problems.
We’ve never really thought about growth in terms of how many people we employ or how big we can make the company, because size isn’t particularly important to us. One of the great things about being independent is that we can flex, bringing people in when we need them and changing the shape of the team depending on the problem in front of us.
There’s also an extraordinary amount of experienced talent in the market now choosing to work independently or as consultants, which means staying lean doesn’t mean having less capability. In many ways it gives us access to more of it, because we can bring in exactly the expertise a problem needs rather than being limited to the people who happen to be on the payroll.
So we don’t spend much time thinking about how big Rethink should become. We’re much more interested in how big the problems are that we can help solve.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Agency Named Desire’s Q&A here
Read The Digital Picnic’s Q&A here
Read Paper Stone Scissors’ Q&A here
Read Curious Nation’s Q&A here
Read cummins&partners’ Q&A here
Read Connecting Plots Group’s Q&A here
Read Jacko Jacko & Jacko’s Q&A here
Read Chimera Project’s Q&A here
Read Today The Brave’s Q&A here
Read Tightknit Studio’s Q&A here
Read Bastion Australia’s Q&A here
Read We Are Different’s Q&A here
Read SICKDOGWOLFMAN’s Q&A here
Read Kill Boring Dead’s Q&A here
Read Oblong Creative’s Q&A here
Read The Many Australia’s Q&A here
Read Bureau of Everything’s Q&A here
Read Art of the Possible ANZ’s Q&A here
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