Workopolis Canada has named Narrative PR its new public relations agency of record. Narrative will be handling B2B and consumer public relations for the brand.
The decision to have Narrative join its roster of agency partners, including creative AOR Zulu Alpha Kilo, was made official last week following a lengthy pitch process. The Bensimon Byrne-owned PR agency beat a handful of other shortlisted agencies to ultimately win the account.
“Narrative really stood out from the crowd not only with their previous accomplishments for clients and savvy use of social media, but also for their willingness to ask hard questions and challenge assumptions,” said Jennifer Posnikoff, director of marketing communications for Workopolis.
“While trying to win a client’s business, most agencies will demonstrate how they can deliver on a client’s stated goals. The team at Narrative went beyond this, debating our set targets and plans, and that is what we were looking for in a new PR firm – not a group of people to merely act on requests, but strategic counsel to help us reach more and more people with our message of improving work lives for Canadians.”
For Narrative, securing the Workopolis account adds to a recent string of new client acquisitions – such as Google Events and Air Canada Rouge – that have helped it build out the consumer portion of its business.
Amanda Alvaro, Narrative’s managing director, echoed Poniskoff, pointing to Narrative’s ability to strategically apply a social lens to its work, as well as marry creativity and strategy, as being predominantly responsible for the account win. While the usual tools will be a part of a Narrative-managed social media portfolio, Alvaro said to expect the unexpected, including Workopolis forays into Pinterest and Instagram.
“One of the aspects of the pitch that I think was important to the win was our ability to marry PR and social strategy,” Alvaro said. “We’d like to see Workopolis pop up in both traditional earned media channels as well as traditional social media channels, but then also underscore with that with some less traditional channels. These are very smart and talented people who said to us, ‘we’re prepared to try some new things in 2013.’ We’d like to leverage the experimenting nature of that group and see what we can do with it.”
Narrative is scheduled to sit down with the rest of Workopolis’ integrated agency team next week. Alvaro said work should start rolling out as early as April.
