The Publicis Groupe announced yesterday the launch of ROAR, an agency built from the ground-up to be a full-service digital shop, with the very-best specialist digital talent drawn from within the group itself. The idea behind ROAR is to bring together all aspects of digital marketing into one agency, with strategy, creative, user experience, media, and analytics all handled by one shop, giving clients the chance to utilise a complete, unified end-to-end digital service. ROAR embraces the idea that people's behaviour is deeply rooted in emotion, and the agency plans to exploit this by using a combination of emotion, intelligence and technology to completely transform and improve the marketing strategies of its clients.
The idea behind ROAR is to bring together all aspects of digital marketing into one agency, with strategy, creative, user experience, media, and analytics all handled by one shop
The ROAR headquarters will be based in New York, but there are also offices in major cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, London and Hong Kong. Though ROAR is still a fledgling company, it has the digital account of leading global financial services firm, JPMorgan Chase (also headquartered in New York) under its belt, an account which spends an estimated $70-80 million every year on digital media. As well as working on the Chase account, ROAR will be also be selectively pursuing additional clients over the ensuing weeks and months.
The ROAR Team
ROAR began as a pitch late last year for the global digital business of JPMorgan Chase, which had until now been split amongst several Publicis Groupe shops such as Razorfish, Rosetta, as well as agencies belonging to other holding groups such as Interpublic's Huge and WPP's AKQA. In the review, executives from numerous Publicis shops helped Chase's digital marketing group's executive director, Gordon Abel realise that by “Consolidating and building a (lead) digital agency,” they would be able to “Push for stronger levels of innovation, efficiency and consistency across the firm.” Concerning the agencies search for other clients, Abel says that whilst he is “Open to understanding how (ROAR) would want to grow as an agency,” right now he has them “Focused on building the agency for JPMorgan Chase.”
ROAR began as a pitch late last year for the global digital business of JPMorgan Chase, which had until now been split amongst several Publicis Groupe shops
Sean Reardon, the former president of strategy at Zenith Media will serve as ROAR's president, and he will be reporting to Tim Jones, the chairman & CEO of ZenithOptimedia, and Rishad Tobaccowala, the chief strategy & innovation officer at VivaKi. The leadership team also comprises Madeleine friend as executive vice president, lead across digital activities, and head of client service, and Eric Pisick as executive vice president of media. Tobaccowala says that "ROAR has been created to meet specific client needs while delivering the alchemy that comes with combining insight, emotion and technology to transform the business of our clients." Jones, meanwhile, believes that “Sean more than fits the bill” as the ROAR leader, as they wanted a leader “With multi-discipline experience and strategic chops,” capable of leading the young agency into the future.
Benjamin Hiorns is a freelance writer and musician from Kidderminster in the UK who has had that infuriating Katy Perry song in his head since he began this article 90 minutes ago!
