Profile: Soche Picard, Chief Executive Officer, North America, Arc Worldwide

Soche Picard stepped to the helm of the North American operations of Arc Worldwide just less than three years ago with the same confidence and pride in her abilities that her single mother instilled in her at a very young age. Under Picard’s leadership as CEO, the agency has undergone what she says has been endless transformation – creating a powerful and unifying operating system around its differentiated brand positioning, “Irresistible Commerce.”The evolution has resulted in galvanizing teams by organizing and evolving work flows and resource management to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. “We’ve doubled our business and helped our clients exponentially increase theirs,” she says. “Our people are happy. Clients are happy. And that makes me so very happy and proud.”Picard began her career in New York City at McCann Erickson in 1995. Her first real new business pitch resulted in the iconic “Priceless” campaign for MasterCard – and gave her the professional confidence to start sharing her voice. Her next stop was TracyLocke in mid-2003, working with Pepsi on its early approaches to shopper marketing.In 2010, she moved again to build an end-to-end agency model at Acosta Sales and Marketing, and in early 2014 at Geometry Global, she embarked on one of the “crowning jewels of my career,” creating and leading a never-been-done-before agency model for Unilever: Team Unilever Shopper, which became a 200-plus, eight-agency, multi-discipline team of innovative shopper marketers driving best-in-class growth for Unilever’s entire portfolio.“I’ve always tried to lead with honesty, transparency, empathy, clarity and humor,” Picard says. She believes any great leader is on a constant quest for evolution and improvement – of herself, her teams and her work – and never accepts the status quo, but exists in a healthy state of restless discontent that enables her to strive for new and better outcomes. This, in turn, inspires those around great leaders to strive for greatness, she says.

Profile: Soche Picard, Chief Executive Officer, North America, Arc Worldwide

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