In the latest brand consolidation move under the Inizio umbrella, the company’s Inizio Engage unit has combined two of its experiential design-focused agencies.
Ashfield Event Experiences and WRG, both of which have been part of Inizio Engage since its creation in mid-2022, have now merged into a single agency, according to a Wednesday announcement.
The newly created Emota will remain situated within the Experience Design (XD) department of the Inizio Engage business unit and will continue its predecessors’ work of designing brand and event experiences and exhibitions for healthcare clients.
Those clients include 19 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, per Inizio. Emota will help those and other partners produce branded experiences for conferences, conventions, internal meetings, public events, product launches and more.
Emota will be led by Mark Jackson, previously global head of environments for WRG. As global managing director of the new agency, he’ll report to Russ Lidstone, president of Inizio Engage XD and chief marketing officer of Inizio Engage.
“We believe that businesses and brands are increasingly defined by the experiences that they create for their stakeholders. So now is the right time to combine our two pre-eminent event brands into Emota, one powerful, global offer,” Lidstone said in the announcement. “I’m truly excited to be able to offer our clients scale, creativity, innovation and delivery excellence for our clients in healthcare and beyond.”
Inizio Engage is one of five business units housed within the larger Inizio, which was created in 2022 through the merger of Ashfield and Huntsworth.
And Inizio Engage isn’t the only unit recently undergoing some changes to simplify its branding. At the start of this year, the health marketing segment previously known only as Evoke rebranded as Inizio Evoke and replaced the Inizio MarComms unit, which was formerly described as being “represented by Evoke” and housed all of Evoke’s specialty agencies.
The changes also included new branding for many of those agencies under the Inizio Evoke heading. Prior to the makeover, many of them still carried the names they held before being acquired by Evoke over the years; after some rearranging and renaming, Inizio Evoke is now populated by a handful of agencies with more straightforward names like Inizio Evoke Comms, Inizio Evoke Media and so on.