By Noemi Pollack
It’s time. (Drumroll please!)
We took the plunge. We are changing our agency’s name to The Pollack Group.
Actually, it doesn’t feel like a plunge at all, for in changing our agency’s name to The Pollack Group, we feel a familiarity with the name, considering that our clients have been affectionately calling us just that, for years. Our name of 33 years, The Pollack PR Marketing Group (PPMG), described exactly what we did – PR and marketing. (Our first two years we were known as Pollack & Setzer, but that is another story).
Our name described us then, but no longer, for there is so much more…
We needed a name that would allow for expansion into whatever we want to be at any time; a name that would allow for inclusion of our creative and digital capabilities, as well as our expanded skills of who we are today – brand psychologists, audience behavior analysts, data geeks, strategic content creators and communicators — and who we want to be tomorrow. The name change needed to allow us the freedom to be visionaries as to our future path and not be siloed into specific offerings.
It also needed to allow us the freedom to reflect better on what our vision for the next era of paid, earned, social and owned media would be in the evolving PR, marketing and communications industries. And it needed to allow us to carry forward our 35-year history of successes as an independent agency and stay on the same course that earned us that excellent reputation garnered over more than three decades.
So now it is our 35th anniversary (drumroll again, please!). I was there, 35 years ago, when it was just two of us, on two credit cards, with a vision of forming a different agency. And that is exactly what happened. We were trailblazers and never looked back. And we remain trailblazers, as we move forward.
It is a different world today, but as the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même,” translated as “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Clients still want their own communication goals met as always, but now they want to go where they have not been before, let’s say a deeper dive into the digital world of communications or the world of artificial intelligence. They still want trusted relationships, only now they look for higher levels of currency and look to the savviness of their counselors to guide them through new and newer platforms, on which they have not yet tread.
And we’ve responded with flexible approaches.
We are privileged to have been a witness throughout our 35 years to some of the most accelerated changes in our industry – ones that have impacted the PR consciousness and subsequently changed the ‘way it was’ forward. And it will continue to change — maybe in a less accelerated way but still, it will be about crafting the customer experience for people “not necessarily like you, (the brand)” – people who are generationally, culturally and geographically different, in order to stand out in a “sea of sameness.”
And, as The Pollack Group, we collectively feel that all vistas are wide open to us.
