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Last year, Pereira O’Dell (POD) employees evaluated the agency’s marketing tactics as though it were one of their clients, and concluded that it needed to reorganize. Aiming to unify the agency’s external messaging, POD leaders merged its new business, public relations and talent teams, incentivizing each group to work toward a common goal.
POD leaders introduced a new structural model that they’re now crediting with recent strong success in winning business. Just this year, the shop brought on seven new clients, including the men’s grooming brand Manscaped, Simplisafe and Sunny D. Five of the seven signed on in January alone.
The agency’s growth offers peers a masterclass on how agencies can approach their own branding tactics. It was neither a rebrand nor a marketing campaign driving the results. The strategy was more straightforward than that, and came down to consistent messaging. Combining the previously disparate groups under a new chief growth officer, Mona Munayyer Gonzalez, helped practices understand how to support each other’s common goals.
Now, POD has found its voice and begun communicating consistently with the media, pitch consultants, and prospective clients and employees. POD’s competitive advantage, according to Munayyer Gonzalez, is its categorization. It’s a mid-sized independent with a 15-year history—one in a relatively small class of shops that regularly compete with holding company networks.
“Growth is defined a bazillion different ways. We are relentlessly focused on defining it as growth of the people and growth of the business. They are co-pilots in the same plane,” she said. “That meant basically taking new business, marketing, PR—but also our talent experience—and bringing it all together as just ‘growth.’”
Combining adjacent practices
Other agencies might find it odd to combine talent acquisition with PR and new business strategy. The structure helps recruiters understand staffing needs for prospective accounts, and properly utilizes the in-house PR team to draw positive attention to its employees. Then, POD can better leverage those employees during new business pitches.
Striking down the business silos helped the agency chase the same goals, avoiding the mistake of chasing new business at the expense of employees and morale.
Before undergoing these structural changes, leadership interviewed employees, existing and prospective clients, journalists and consultants, to find out whether the agency’s external messaging had resonated with them. The agency developed a brand architecture and named its previous chief creative officer, Robert Lambrechts, its chief strategy officer. Jason Apaliski, formerly executive creative director, stepped into the CCO job.
The agency gathered a few internal statistics to measure its progress and pinpoint focus areas. Honing its messaging increased its press coverage from 10 articles in early 2023 to 78 during the same period this year. The agency’s internal survey also yielded mostly positive results, with employees rating the shop highly for statements like “management genuinely cares about my wellbeing” and “management keeps me informed about what is happening at the agency.”
