Timeline

In a market already crowded with all multinational agencies, operating under the umbrella of powerful groups, a new agency was launched. A brand new agency, with a resolutely articulated name, The Group.

We decided to temper the sonority of the name, which could easily have slipped into over-confidence through non-chromatic branding, stripping away any visual symbolism. We even dropped the use of capital letters in the company logo.

In in other words, as a statement of core values, we paired the momentum of any beginning with moderation and minimalism, without losing sight of the fact that our stride must remain resolute and our direction must always be forward.

Several agencies developed under The Group umbrella: the first one was Media Investment. Shortly followed by the creative agency.

Then the public relations agency, which in the same year was selected as a partner of Omnicom, with whom we established the Porter Novelli agency. So 2006 became the year of fast forward. There were already about 60 of us, and we were tirelessly building up, often without clear direction or a stated goal, but only with the vision that decisive steps forward carry you ahead of everyone else.

We were growing steadily, at an accelerated pace.  We didn’t claim it, the figures showed it – the least subjective voice to testify.  In 2007 we were among the top three players on the market in terms of turnover. We were proud that we could compete with everyone as a solid, complex, almost complete group. We were already over 100 people in the team and our audacity was motivated by our remarkable success rate in the pitches.

By the end of 2008 we were already almost 200 people strong and had become the market leader in communications, proving to ourselves that there is no “no” to a dream to which we contribute daily with hard work, rigor and dedication.

In the enthusiasm of the years of economic growth 2007-2008 and the consequent flourishing of the communication industry, many people still did not see the 2008 crisis.

At The Group we quickly reshaped our working model, adjusted our formulas and kept one key word: efficiency.

We have strengthened ourselves as a lean organization, without a thick hierarchy, without bureaucratic procedures, without passive teams. We have focused on translating this model into absolutely every aspect of our business, including the relationship of our teams with our customers and suppliers, so that together we find the most effective way to achieve our goals every time.

As the market challenged us to manage the effects of a recession, we learned to get back to the core objectives of our work. We rediscovered that what matters to the public is substance, and that form should be our secondary concern.

We have relearned to be cross-disciplinary, we have relearned that the success of a team comes from the way each person knows and can do more than what is outlined in the job description.

We rediscovered the screen, in its new form – more miniaturized, more handy. The TV was no longer the only effective visual way to share the brand story in an epic way, but we had an ecosystem of complementary screens at our disposal – the computer, the tablet, the cell phone…

The market was still declining significantly. It was a double-digit percentage decline year after year. However, we grew steadily, a signal that once the right tools are found, the vision of one’s own trajectory to the future and the people to step decisively in that direction, progress remains just a matter of persistence.

For seven years now, The Group has been challenging the prejudice that an independent media agency cannot be the market leader.

It had never happened anywhere else for so many consecutive years, so it couldn’t just be… a happy accident. We were excited to set an example of the status an entrepreneurial independent business can reach in such a competitive industry.

2012 was also when The Group decisively strengthened its partnership with Omnicom Media Group.

We were steadily gathering market share despite shrinking budgets. A fortunate situation, which seemed to be the fruit of a proper acknowledgment of a return to integrated services, a reaffirmation of the need for complete communication solutions in more elastic and numerically scaled-down formulas.

Several specialized agencies under The Group’s umbrella were becoming part of the company, merging into efficient hubs and harmonizing their professional approach with the other entities.

In an effort to keep building, in 2014 more than ever we embraced a return to our roots. To the people, for they really make things happen.

We stepped up our training courses and team-building activities, through an extensive internal communication program set to unify and attune our concepts. To each become better and together stronger in facing challenges of a future that we had only guessed at. At the same time, we solidified our vision for the next decade, which we anticipated totally different from a strategic marketing and media solutions perspective.

True to our promise to always be one step ahead of the market, in April 2015 we launched the first agency to specialize in programmatic media and marketing analytics in Romania: Prometheus.

Programmatic media represents the activity that brings together, from the brands’ perspective, the three vital notions: marketing, economics, technology.With the launch of Prometheus, The Group reinforces its position as a leader in the Romanian communication industry.

We all had a sense that the Internet as we knew it was about to take on a new meaning. We realized that the power of the huge amount of data on the web would cause a dramatic change in all the routines we were used to.

The relentless pursuit brought us into a realm that was not yet conceptually defined, but was showing tremendous potential – Artificial Intelligence.

We have decided that this new frontier of information must be brought to light, for partners, for customers, for those who, like us, are inspired by a new challenge. And so, with our partners at Omnicom, we released the Sentience editorial project, about the dawn of artificial intelligence as it looked in 2017.

It was the year that no one thought possible, with states, emotions and attributes we had never experienced before. For a few months, the world came to a standstill, businesses found themselves stuck, and the entire business community was looking for solutions.

Teams were isolated, workflows were migrating online, customers had more questions than budgets. And we were all wearing blue masks.

We learned that uncertainty would guide our lives and concerns for the next while. How long would it last? No one really knew. But we knew for sure that this was not a time for long-term planning, and the key word would become adaptability.

The second year of the pandemic would find us more clear-headed, more prepared to deal with an exceptional state of affairs. Online meetings became the norm, ink was drying in the printers. Delivery services were rapidly consolidating, while online shops were booming.

We were discovering our deeply human, extra-professional side, trying to help where we could get actively involved.

The industry adapted quite quickly to the new reality, learning to survive in the new context. We learned quite fast that a team still needs face-to-face meetings, office experience, particularly for newcomers. A new reality.

The year of the liberation from the pandemics was also the moment when we realized that we needed to dramatically change the way we think. We preferred to leave the pandemic behind with lessons learned, not accumulated traumas.

We realized that everything we do must be flexible, adapting quickly to any change in the ecosystem. In short, we have learned the lesson of sustainability as a professional value.

It was no secret that data was and still is an everyday tool in our profession. The way we manage data often defines the success of a campaign, its viralization, its effectiveness.

In 2024, a new company joined The Group – Digital Data Capital (DDC), a team of young, enthusiastic, digital natives with exceptional digital innovation skills. We grasped and applied the lesson of numbers as the decisive foundation of creativity. We now have the ability to process a potentially endless volume of data to deliver personalized communication solutions so that brands’ messages benefit from relevance and authenticity in their dialogue with every type of consumer.