Ten years ago, we founded Rika with a fairly simple idea; there had to be a better agency model for clients who needed experienced strategic advice without losing the ability to actually get things done. Last week, in our tenth anniversary year, Rika was ranked in The Drum’s Indie 100, the global ranking of elite independent agencies. It is a milestone we are extremely proud of, but what makes it particularly satisfying is what sits behind it.
The recognition that matters
The Drum’s Indie 100 is based on three measures; performance in the World Creative Rankings, success at The Drum Awards and verified client ratings through The Drum Recommends. Whilst we can’t say exactly what put Rika in the Top 100, of those three measures, the one that means the most to us is the last one; it’s what our clients think about us.
We have never been particularly good at shouting about ourselves, and perhaps we should have been, but most of our energy has gone into doing the work, solving problems, adding value and building client relationships that last.
So being recognised in a world ranking that explicitly takes the client experience into account feels particularly important to us. Our clients consistently tell us they value our objectivity, breadth of capability and ability to move quickly when circumstances change.
Most importantly, they trust us.
That trust is probably the most valuable thing an independent business like ours can earn.
Why we built Rika
When we founded Rika in 2016, we had already spent years working in and around agencies, consultancies, technology companies and client-side teams.
We had seen plenty that worked well but we’d also seen the weaknesses in the prevailing models.
We had seen how easily the traditional agency model could create distance between strategy and delivery. Senior teams often led the early contractual stages of an engagement, while day-to-day delivery moved to teams with less experience. Strategy, technology and execution would sit in separate disciplines, and clients were often left coordinating the gaps between agencies, partners and their own internal teams. Commercial realities and agency incentives inevitably shaped some of those decisions and relationships too. Too often, the promises made were never realised and client-agency relationships were too short to deliver meaningful outcomes.
We wanted to build something different and something more honest than that; a business where experienced people stayed involved, where advice would be genuinely objective, where understanding the commercial problem mattered more than selling a particular service, where strategy and delivery were connected rather than passed from one team to another and where we did what we said we would do, and more. Every time.
Our independence has been central in making that possible.
We have had many opportunities to sell Rika along the way, but remaining independent has allowed us to protect the things we believed mattered in the first place: our culture, our standards and, crucially, our judgement.
Independence means that we can recommend what we believe is right for the client rather than what suits a wider commercial agenda. That may sound obvious but, in practice, it matters enormously.
Ten years of change
The interesting thing about reaching ten years is seeing just how much the market around us has changed.
Rika started with strong roots in marketing technology and digital transformation. Over time, our work expanded into marketing strategy, media, analytics, customer experience, creative, CRM, digital products and campaign delivery.
That evolution was not the result of deciding that we wanted to become a bigger, broader agency, it happened because the problems our clients were asking us to solve increasingly crossed those boundaries.
A customer journey problem might actually be a CRM problem. An underperforming media campaign might expose weaknesses in measurement, proposition or user experience. A new technology platform might fail to deliver value because the organisation, content or operating model around it was wrong.
The dividing lines between Business, Marketing and Technology have become increasingly artificial, and problematic, and now AI is disrupting just about everything in its path.
Routine execution is becoming easier to automate, week by week. More capability is moving in-house, the big platforms are doing more of the optimisation with their own AI technologies, and teams have access to more data, tools and ways of producing outputs than ever before.
Yet making good decisions has arguably become harder, and more capability does not automatically create more clarity.
Where Rika fits now
All of this has meant Rika needed to keep evolving too, and we have evolved.
We’ve always described Rika as sitting somewhere between an agency and a consultancy. This nomenclature isn’t because the market needs another category, but because neither label describes particularly well what many clients actually need.
Strategy without delivery can leave organisations with an expensive idea and no meaningful change.
Delivery without strategy can create plenty of activity without solving the underlying problems.
Our role is to connect the two.
We help clients understand what is really holding performance back, decide where intervention will create the most value and then stay involved through implementation and well-beyond.
Sometimes that means strategy, sometimes it means marketing, technology, creative or customer experience but more often it means several of them at once. The important part is that the solution follows the problem, rather than the problem being made to fit whatever an agency happens to sell.
That principle feels remarkably consistent with the principles on which we started Rika ten years ago. The capabilities have changed, the technology has changed and the market has changed, but our underlying idea has not.
Independence still matters
There is plenty of discussion and noise about what AI will mean for agencies; some work will undoubtedly disappear, some will move in-house and some things that once required large specialist teams will become dramatically faster and cheaper to produce.
We don't believe that this diminishes the need for good partners like Rika, but we do think it changes what clients should value about them.
The scarce resource is becoming less about access to executional capability and more about experience, judgement and taste; knowing what problem to solve, what not to do, where technology genuinely helps, where it does not, and how to connect decisions across disparate parts of the organisation.
This requires experience, objectivity and a willingness to challenge the brief when necessary. It also requires the ability to move from thinking to doing, iteratively.
That is the space Rika intends to keep occupying.
So, thank you
Being included in The Drum’s Global Indie 100 is a significant moment for us, particularly in our tenth year, but it is also a meaningful validation of something more important.
Ten years ago, we made a deliberate choice about the kind of business we wanted to build, the kind of people we wanted in the business and the kind of relationships we wanted to have with our clients. A decade later, our clients are still telling us that those same qualities matter.
To everyone who has worked with us, recommended us, challenged us and trusted us over those ten years, thank you!
We are very proud to be in The Drum’s Global Indie 100, but we are considerably more interested in what we build next, with you and for you.
You can learn more about what our clients say about us and see the full Indie Agency 100.
