Omnicom EMERGING STARS
Being seen across 1,500 agencies
How a brand identity became a shared signal for recognition inside one of the world's largest agency networks
Client: Omnicom Group
Sectors: Advertising, Marketing
Role: Director of Customer Experience Design (C Space London), Global Programmes Director (Omnicom London)
1,500+
agencies reached
100+
countries
Situation
A programme with strong content and no lasting signal.
Omnicom's Emerging Stars programme had a clear purpose: bring together the most promising junior talent from across the network, give them a live client brief, and let them pitch to agency CEOs and a senior client representative. The content was strong. The structure worked. What was missing was any sense that being part of it meant something.
Each edition felt like a standalone event. The identity was generic enough to be forgettable. For a network of 1,500 agencies operating across more than 100 countries, that was a problem with a cost. Junior talent was being gathered, developed, and sent home without a lasting signal that they had been truly seen.
Approach
Recognition as design brief, not design output.
Before any design decision was made, the work started with people. We interviewed young creatives across Omnicom agencies in Europe, Asia, and North America. Open conversations, sometimes uncomfortable, about what it actually felt like to be early in a career inside a giant network. What came back consistently was a need that the programme had not yet addressed: people wanted to be recognised, not just selected.
That insight shaped every subsequent design decision. The brand experience had to do something specific: make each participant feel located, visible, and part of something with momentum.
The identity was designed to carry meaning at scale, across disciplines, languages, and formats, without losing its emotional grounding.
System
An identity built to govern itself across a global operation.
The service design challenge was unglamorous and essential. Digital invitations, event signage, pitch decks, posters, assets across multiple continents were produced without a centralised creative team managing each output.
I directed the system to hold that. The visual language was built from that requirement outward. A growing X mark to signal presence. The OCR-B typeface, borrowed from optical character recognition systems, repurposed into a human signal of being seen. A gradient that moved, suggesting transition rather than arrival.
The decisions made at the brand experience level, the mark, the type, the gradient, were not aesthetic choices sitting on top of the programme. They were structural. Each element had a rationale that any team could apply without losing the intent. The result was an identity that travelled without needing translation, because the logic behind it was legible to anyone who had to use it. That is a governance outcome as much as a design one.
Outcomes
A programme that finally felt like a movement.
Experience Systems connected the brand experience of recognition with the customer experience of participation and the service design of global delivery, and the result was an internal programme that behaved like a movement. Inside Omnicom, Emerging Stars became a reference point for how design can shape internal culture, not just external communication.
- P&G's Global GM of Skincare named the talent, the ideas, and the energy of the experience directly
- PayPal recognised the clarity and quality of what participants produced
- Senior Omnicom leaders cited the programme as a model for cross-discipline collaboration and cultural investment
- The identity functioned across 1,500+ agencies and 100+ countries without adaptation or loss of intent
“Omnicom friends, what an amazing experience! Thank you again for choosing Olay to be your partner in the Emerging Stars Program. The talent, the ideas, the energy and the partnership was amazing. It says a lot about the Omnicom family when you see this type of focus and investment in top talent. Thank you for choosing P&G and Olay to be your partner.”
Leigh Radford
Global GM Skincare
P&G
Curious how this approach might apply in your context?
Ale
Chief Experience & Design Officer
Design is an act of attention.
For the people. For the business. For the system that connects them.
Based in London
Open to relocation across UK and EU
Fractional, Interim, Permanent