Finding Extraordinary

By Jon Lonsdale, CEO, Publicis Pro

Here’s a question:

What about you and your business is extraordinary?

Trust us, there will be something. And while there might be an uncomfortable moment as you reflect and ask what exactly it is about you, your work, or your company that sets you apart, you’ll feel good when you find it.

While you think on that, let me tell you about how that one word came to be so integral to the new story and positioning for our agency.

Why extraordinary?

The decision to reposition our agency, making the big shift from Octopus Group to Publicis Pro, was taken as a group. And as anyone who has been involved in such a wide ranging brand project knows, these things take time, care and attention.

Our first consideration was what kind of agency do we want to be, and how that differed from the Brand to Sales story we’d been telling for almost ten years.

Global came up early. Being part of the world’s biggest agency network had given us unprecedented opportunities to work on ambitious multi-region marketing and advertising programmes. It was time to represent that in our brand.

A centre of excellence, too. Since joining PG, we’ve established ourselves as the agency that really gets business marketing and can do it well for a range of clients.

So far, so clear.

But we then got to thinking about how we were showing up, and how we see the business world.

To the first point: it was important we simplified everything about our agency and brand. B2B can appear fussy and needlessly complex. Whereas the truth is that – just like in consumer marketing – great ideas and decisive action really cut through. We had to represent that in our identity, story, services and communications.

Next came arguably the most important thing of all: how we see business.

B2B can be a little bit apologetic about itself. We don’t agree with that, and we’re keen to bring it to an end. In our view, B2B marketing can be every bit as creatively ambitious and interesting as our consumer counterparts. It can be funny, brave, assertive, challenging, emotional – whatever the business itself is.

Which brings me to extraordinary.

Our fundamental belief is that there is something extraordinary in every business. Businesses do extraordinary things, are built on extraordinary ideas and are run by extraordinary people.

We also believe that it’s not getting any easier for businesses to stand out. Whether you look at challenging economic circumstances, the march of intensely disruptive technologies, or genuinely world changing innovation, the stakes are getting higher.

Within this environment, it takes something extraordinary to get yourself heard and noticed.

This thinking led us to Find Your Extraordinary. Three words that sit under our new name, but represent so much more than a tagline. To us, and you, here are three simple ways of understanding what it means:

• A mission: we find the extraordinary in every business and tell the world about it
• A manifesto: we stand to deliver the extraordinary in everything we do, across creative, strategy, influence and commerce
• A mirror: we hold ourselves, our people and our work accountable to this standard at all times

So, back to what’s extraordinary about you.

It’s an exercise we recently went through ourselves, as we developed the ethos behind Publicis Pro, and unpacked the word extraordinary.

Our view is that extraordinary means the unprecedented, the original, the uncommon. It’s something to be treasured and valued. And it’s worth talking about.

But it doesn’t always mean being big, showy and flash. Instead, we believe that extraordinary lives everywhere. From the greatest spectacles on earth to the humblest ideas. It exists in people, the work they do, and the impact they have.

You might know what yours is by now, as you’ve read this piece.

And if you don’t? Give us a call.