Omnicom SHAPE
Situation
Omnicom is one of the largest marketing and communications groups in the world, home to tens of thousands of specialists across hundreds of agencies. The problem was that clients rarely experienced that scale.
Internally, silos were structural. Disciplines and agencies operated in parallel rather than together, and the network's collective intelligence stayed largely invisible to clients it could have served. Leadership needed something concrete: a visible, working proof point that Omnicom could deliver ideas at speed, across agencies, for real client challenges.
SHAPE was the answer. An invite-only online platform where the best thinkers from across the network would come together to work on live client briefs. Not a workshop, not a one-off event. A repeatable system with its own brand, its own service journey, and its own community, capable of taking a client challenge from brief to actionable output within days.
Approach
I led experience, product, and service design across the full programme, working with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, strategists, and designers from brief to delivery.
Branding came first. SHAPE needed its own verbal and visual identity, something that could hold prestige within the Omnicom environment. We built a full brand system: name, tone, and a visual language bold enough to signal that this was different from standard network initiatives. "Connected Brilliance" became the organising idea, applied consistently from the first contributor invitation to the final client session. Invite-only positioning was a deliberate brand experience decision, not a logistical one.
We mapped the full service journey and structured it into five defined stages: client and agency onboarding, brief crafting, live ideation with the SHAPE community, thematic analysis, and a facilitated co-creation session presenting refined outputs back to the client. Gamified recognition rituals were built into the ideation phase to sustain energy and signal that contribution mattered.
The programme operated at three levels of engagement, from rapid inspiration downloads through to fully facilitated concept development sessions co-created with the client. That range meant SHAPE could serve a pitch situation, a client relationship-building moment, or a full innovation workstream, within the same system.
System
The service design gave it governance: time-boxed sprints with defined intake, ideation, analysis, and debrief stages meant each engagement could be run consistently regardless of the challenge, the client, or the mix of agencies involved. Agencies that had never worked together before could contribute to a shared output within a structure they understood from the first invite.
Clients brought real problems with real commercial stakes. They received structured, attributed outputs within days and joined a facilitated co-creation session to refine and apply them. That is what distinguished working with Omnicom through SHAPE from a standard pitch or workshop.
Outcomes
Experience Systems connected the brand experience that made SHAPE worth joining, the customer experience that gave clients structured, commercial-grade outputs, and the service design that made every engagement repeatable at network scale. The results reflect all three working as one.
