Omnicom EMERGING STARS
In Brief
Omnicom's global junior talent pitch programme.
Give Emerging Stars a coherent identity and signal.
Research across Europe, Asia, and North America.
Built brand identity from emotional insight outward.
Directed system to scale without a centralised team.
Outcomes and Impact
Delivered across 1,500+ agencies, 100+ countries.
Recognised directly by P&G and PayPal at senior level.
Situation
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 and sent home without a signal that they had been truly seen.
Approach
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 seen and part of something with momentum. I designed the identity to carry meaning at scale, across disciplines, languages, and formats, without losing its emotional grounding.
System
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.
Outcomes
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.
Leigh Radford
Global GM Skincare
P&G
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