What Does It Mean To Be "Creative"?

Moving into 1,300 square feet of exposed brick in Gastown felt like a major milestone, and it was. Cats roamed freely and hid on top of the sound booth, beside the hot water pipe. The investments in audio-visual equipment continued. Our business had firmed up again, we had hired two new superstar designers, and we began to wonder just how "creative" we could be, and what sorts of clients we might take on. If we had made it to a trendy Gastown office, we wondered, just how far could we go?

Unfortunately for us, our internal processes remained underdeveloped, with almost all work requests still arriving centrally via John, and being distributed out in a "newsroom" model once or more per day. A minor problem when everyone is in one place... but a major problem for what was to come.

The Pandemic Years

The COVID pandemic was our biggest challenge yet, as we struggled with the forced experiment of becoming a remote work company... and then a hybrid work company... and then a remote work company... and then a very confused company. Despite successful business continuity (and Mirim's fantastic mural depicting our team in the era of hand sanitizers, masks, and video calls), our internal communication was slowed, training suffered, and our work culture greatly eroded. As the pandemic receded, we made the decision to return to being a primarily in-office company.

Not long thereafter, we found that our clients' needs - and our ability to serve them - looked different from before. The painful remote work period had forced us to upgrade internal systems and become both more organized and more flexible. Our clients were now looking for larger, more strategic engagements that integrated the full range of our services, and as it turned out, we were able to deliver. Through the experience we had managed to both diversify and grow, and we were now capable of offering a true end-to-end suite of in-house “creative communications” services.

"Evolving" Identity

The COVID pandemic was our biggest challenge yet, as we struggled with the forced experiment of becoming a remote work company... and then a hybrid work company... and then a remote work company... and then a very confused company. Despite successful business continuity (and Mirim's fantastic mural depicting our team in the era of hand sanitizers, masks, and video calls), our internal communication was slowed, training suffered, and our work culture greatly eroded. As the pandemic receded, we made the decision to return to being a primarily in-office company.

Not long thereafter, we found that our clients' needs - and our ability to serve them - looked different from before. The painful remote work period had forced us to upgrade internal systems and become both more organized and more flexible. Our clients were now looking for larger, more strategic engagements that integrated the full range of our services, and as it turned out, we were able to deliver. Through the experience we had managed to both diversify and grow, and we were now capable of offering a true end-to-end suite of in-house “creative communications” services.

Team Progression And Internal Structure

As our team has grown, we have developed an ever-growing repository of documentation, allowing us to standardize our most complex workflows and onboard new staff members as quickly as possible. We have embraced the concept of ongoing training with new modules being offered to the entire office as often as possible. And we have improved our internal structure, with clearly organized file teams and clarity on company-wide roles and responsibilities.

95% of our clients are public awareness-type campaigns, and these require a different skill set and set of knowledge than campaigns that sell products or services.  For this reason, we created two unique in-house training courses from scratch: Public Interest Communications Consulting 101 and Public Interest Communications Consulting 102.  The two training modules total more than 30 pages and are delivered to all of our staff through two multi-hour interactive seminars.

We strongly believe that everyone who works here should have an opportunity to develop new skills and progress in their career. Nobody at Proximis is ever limited in their career advancement, so long as they are willing to put in the work needed to learn new skills, and within the confines of our needs. Over the years we have seen a designer become a project manager, an illustrator become a financial administrator, a editor become a department manager, a coder become a voice actor, and a copywriter become an ad buyer. In fact, we believe it is our multidisciplinary approach to work that has allowed us to offer such a broad range of services within a moderately-sized company, with minimal disruptions during staff turnover.

Great Clients And Big Awards

2023 turned out to be our most successful year yet, with our team hitting a peak 12 employees, and new major client projects taking off. Clients are the single most important asset for any agency, and we have been blessed with phenomenal clients who are a true pleasure to work with every day.

Perhaps the highlight of the year was our multi-award showing at the annual Canadian Public Relations Society Awards of Excellence gala in Whistler. Along with one of our longstanding clients, the National Police Federation, we won Gold in the category of Canadian Digital Communications Campaign of the Year, and Bronze in the category of External Communications.

A Cheese vs. Chocolate fondue competition, held at night on top of Cypress Mountain, came in a close second.
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As for what comes next? As Natasha Bedingfield put it: The rest is still unwritten.

A Studio In The Sky!

In 2022, we moved to our current office suite, in the United Kingdom Building at the corner of Granville and Hastings. While we miss the creative energy and red brick aesthetic of Gastown, we have been won over (at least for now) by the proximity to clients and transit, and functional meeting spaces.

Change has always been core to our identity. New digital advertising methods are what allowed our company to get started… and as technology, trends, and methods have changed, so have we. We seek to continually understand what is to come, learn from it, and figure out how to use it.

In recent years,  we developed and trademarked the tagline “Communication. Evolved.®” It is Canadian trademarked with the number “TMA1070260”, and you can look it up. That’s why you see the ® symbol when we use the tagline! At the same time, we trademarked the name “Proximis Digital” (TMA1068633), for even stronger corporate brand protection, Canada-wide.

The final piece of our modern brand came when we added the moniker “PRX” as a shortform for Proximis. We don’t formally own this name, but it’s become a simplified and friendly term for our company.