We believe in the power of creativity to transform human behavior — not just what people think and feel, but what they do. We’re in business to be the world’s best creator of ideas that truly move people — bar none.

We move people to experience, to purchase, to recommend, and to return. Because at the end of the day, every marketing challenge begins and ends with two things: people and their behavior.

By unearthing deeper insights into how and why people do what they do, we develop creative solutions that measurably impact their behavior. People today don’t live their lives online or offline, shopping or consuming, alone or with their social network.

They just live — and move through the world in a way that defies the traditional discipline silos. Forward-thinking marketers understand that they need an agency that can move people everywhere they move — an agency that has real expertise in cross-channel activation.

Our legacy of thought leadership in digital, direct, promotion and retail/shopper marketing informs everything we do. By putting an activating idea at the center of our marketing efforts — an idea that triggers involvement — and uniting all the marketing disciplines and media channels around it, we connect more effectively with people and inspire them to act. That’s always been our focus and that’s why clients call us.

A brand has to have a purpose in people’s lives. It’s not about positioning and targets. It’s about manifesting a brand’s purpose in a way that resonates with real people to such a degree that they actually want to participate, engage and become part of something.

Many clients feel that people are aware of and understand their brand, but they are not necessarily buying it more often, trying new varieties or recommending the brand to friends.

They are not getting behavior change. The recession really forced clients to take a hard look at the ROI on their marketing efforts and realize that whatever they do has to not only build the brand but also build sales. We’ve always believed the best work does both.

But engaging people these days isn’t that easy. People have more options, more control and higher expectations. In this new world, getting people to change their minds, and ultimately their behavior, requires a real understanding of people.

We have a history of being on the forefront of developing new levels of insight. We launched a multi-channel shopper study, which was featured in the Hub (see: Precision, Prudence & Passion, The Hub, November 2009). We were the first to look at all aspects that could potentially affect a shopper’s journey — even those outside of the store.

Everybody tended to think about shopping as only happening in a retail environment. They weren’t thinking about how the “likes” and “dislikes” of your Facebook friends or some mobile content on your phone can impact what you ultimately buy in the aisle.

One interesting insight from the study is that people shop differently based on the channel and product category. A shopper might be more price-sensitive in a certain category or retailer, and on more of a treasure hunt in another category and at another retailer. Understanding that kind of shopper “segmentation” allows us to deliver more powerful creative.

We recently won the Walgreens business and one of our first tasks was to help drive their seasonal flu shots. They had set an ambitious goal the previous year of giving one million flu shots, but they wanted us to quintuple that and help them reach five million flu shots.

We actually did it, and we achieved that result through a true cross-channel activation idea. But it began by connecting with the right people — in this case, “intender” moms. These are moms who each year truly intend to get their flu shots, but because of how busy their lives are, never actually get around to it.

The strategic insight was that these moms consistently put their families’ needs ahead of their own. So while her children’s flu shots are at the top of her “to-do” list, her flu shot keeps moving further down the list as other family activities and events pop up, until she either gets the flu or misses the window.

So, we reframed the discussion to show her that her flu shot was something she could do for her family, to protect the ones she loves from getting exposed to the flu and to make sure she’s healthy enough to continue caring for them.

We did this by creating an iconic way for her to show that love. We created special heart-shaped band-aids to be placed on her arm after the shot where she could write the names of the people she’s protecting with her shot.

It looked like the classic heart-shaped tattoo, and we took her picture, flexing her muscle in the iconic Rosie-the-Riveter pose. We then uploaded a stream of actual photos to the digital outdoor billboard in Times Square.

As each mom walked around with this band-aid tattoo, it let everyone know who she got her shot for, which prompted them to think about who they should get a shot for. Then they would get a shot, get a sticker, and the whole thing would repeat in the best sort of viral way.

The program literally brought to life Walgreens’ brand purpose of wellness while driving five million flu shot visits in just five weeks and capturing a 70 percent flu shot market share. It’s a Walgreens branded property now that they can activate year after year.

Our advantage is that we were born out of several specialist companies that were aggregated. The reason we have truly best-in-class in shopper/retail, promotion, digital and direct all under one roof, is that the individual companies that formed Arc were leaders in one or more of those areas.

As a result, when we diagnose the multi-channel shopping behavior that represents the critical barrier or opportunity, we can develop the core activation idea and actually execute it in all channels in a best-in-class way, from shopper marketing to social media. That enables us to connect with people when and where it’s most relevant to change their behavior.

What drives it all is our insights into people. For example, in our retail group, we’ve developed a substantial environmental design capability with a group of specialists whose expertise is designing stores and physical environments. It came out of our analyses of the way people move through spaces. People are not standing and statically viewing a series of two-dimensional posters from a consistent point of view. They are moving through space and time in uniquely identifiable ways, with all of the associated shifting of perspectives and need states.

That led us to bring an environmental design perspective to our retail communications which has elevated the solutions we’re bringing to clients like Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. In the case of our 40-year relationship with McDonald’s, it is not only driving messaging innovation, it is enabling us to help them develop a digital menu board system and design their stores of the future.

Bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines mirrors the way people live and interact today, which leads to measurably more impactful solutions for our clients. Whether the idea plays out in-store, online, over the phone or via underground networks, we’re connecting with people when and where they’re most receptive, and changing what they do.

It all starts with insight into people and what has value to them, and the ability to leverage the right touchpoint in just the right way. That’s the recipe for the agency of the future, and that’s what we’ve set out to build.