Royalties

History

Jobin met Alexandre De Coupigny while they were both employed at Interbrand in 2003, with the former serving as managing director and the latter as director of Brand Valuation. In 2008, they joined with Bontemps, co-founder of the agency View, which specialized in motion design, to launch their own agency. The trio pitched their branding agency project to several major organisations, one of which was the Publicis Group.

Publicis France, under the leadership of Philippe Lenstchener (past president of Publicis France), was looking to develop a brand management offering. Publicis and Eurogroup jointly contributed to the founding of the agency, which became the flagship branding agency of the Publicis Group. It grew from the financial assessment of brands to the creation and management of brands, from their positioning in the market to their visual and verbal identities.

Radio France, Orange S.A., La Société des bains de mer de Monaco and Pages Jaunes formed the agency's initial client-base. In the following years it would win further projects for Atos, HSBC, Castorama, Deutsch Telekom group, Galeries Lafayette, Kingfisher, Société Générale, SFR, and the Palace of Versailles, among others.

In 2014, Publicis sold its 60% stake in Royalties to the agency's founding members, giving Royalties its independence. Shortly after, De Coupigny left the agency.

2018 - the move to Ecobranding

Sylvain Boyer, the founder of Ecobranding, joined Royalties in 2018. The overarching principle of Ecobranding is to cut down on the resources used to communicate a brand. It reduces the environmental and financial costs of communications and is verified by an independent scientific review. Though it uses less, the aim of Ecobranding is to distill a brand's visual expression and improve its impact and accessibility, as well as being visible proof of a company's commitment to change.

Royalties has since adapted its client approach to incorporate Boyer's research and findings, with the addition of an extra pillar, ‘resilience’, to the existing brand model of ‘meaning, appearance, and experience.’ This marked a significant change in Royalties raison d’etre, a codified acknowledgment that no brand can be complete without meeting the obligations it has to society.

Many of Royalties’ best-known clients have adopted elements of the Ecobranding method, including Orange S.A. Royalties was approached for a full review of Orange's physical and digital touchpoints. As a brand that is seen mostly on digital, Royalties designed a new, simpler digital logo with higher visibility, 56% less data, and 28% less ink.

The new decade gave Royalties a bigger platform to display its commitment to ecobranding. Atos, a global frontrunner in decarbonized and secure IT, sought a complete refresh of its visual identity. Royalties won the tender by proposing a novel solution based around a single principle: keep screens dark, and keep paper white. The designs were chosen to use less energy on digital and less ink on paper. These comprehensive changes were reviewed and validated independently.