Behind the name: PINC's evolution from the 2004 name Pantarei

In the business of brand building and advertising, having a name that stands out and is memorable matters. In our numerous interactions with agencies, we often hear unconventional names and often wonder how these names came around. Coming up next in our series of interviews with independent players in Indonesia is Paragon Incorporation, better known as PINC.  

Though it was founded in 2019, PINC’s journey first started as early as 2004 when Michael Sudarto, Irawan Soemardjo, and Hermanto Soerjanto formed Pantarei that year. “Pantarei” means that everything is ever-flowing and everchanging, Nugroho Nurarifin, senior partner, PINC told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

Nurarifin's journey with PINC has also been an interesting one. Nurafin joined the team at the time as Pantarei’s first writer, and left about two years later to venture further into the advertising world in Indonesia. 

Nurarifin then met the founders of Pantarei once again in 2018, and realised during their conversation that big international agency networks were struggling to meet the growing demand of the Indonesian advertising scene. Nurarifin knew then that the time was opportune. “At the end of the lunch, I realised it was time for me to return home. I was running Grey Indonesia at the time as its ECD. I left the job and in April 2019, and we began the reconstruction,” he added. 

Nurarifin said that the team knew they needed a holding company. They intuitively went for PINC to represent “Pantarei Incorporation”, but decided that the holding company should serve as a bigger cauldron – an ultimate space for agencies, brands and people to ever grow and ever-evolve. From there, Sudarto came up with the term “Paragon”, to represent “the great vessel of a company”, Nurarifin explained.  

PINC has since grown to include a total of five companies – Pantarei, Mata Angin, W3P, Imadi, Batubata – and is approximately 200 people strong. Pantareii and Mata Angin are full-service agencies, and have worked with brands such as Lazada, UOB, Indosat Ooredoo and Bank Jago. Meanwhile, W3P is more digitally focused, while Imadi is an influencer management agency that has since branched out to digital production, video production, as well as activation all with social media proficiency as its core.  Lastly, Batubata is a data driven field marketing and activation agency with offices in nine cities across Indonesia.

This year, Nurarifin said that the agency PINC is looking to welcome more companies into its fold. To that end, PINC created the division of partnership, incubation and business integration. Nurarifin added that the agency’s focus this year will be to sustain the momentum that it enjoyed during 2020 and 2021.  

However, incorporating PINC was not without its own set of challenges. According to Nurararifin, one of the biggest challenges it faced as a holding company was helping the agencies to sail on their own - to find their own form, culture, way of thinking and operations, thus preparing themselves to be able to constantly regenerate and reinvent themselves with time. “As we put our horizon in the infinite, we will always have our attention on preparing the next generation of leaders. The kind of leaders that will create more leaders. That is the only way to tame the greatest of challenges - growth and survival for years to come.” 

Nonetheless, Nurarifin said that he is really proud of the respect and the love that the team has for one another. “From the very beginning we have never only recognised skills and knowledge, but also attitude. That makes values such as honesty rank high in our house,” he added.  At the same time, PINC has shown actionable impact towards its “commitment to diversity and equal opportunity” with both its Pantarei and Mata Angin being led by female CEOs to inspire women to climb the corporate ladder in the workforce. 

Much like many other agencies, COVID-19 also taught the agency to be open to changes with the company now enabling employees with flexible work options. As with many others, PINC was, of course, initially nervous as to whether work could be delivered to the same level while relying only on Zoom and Google Meet to convene with one another. However, remote working turned out to be better than expected for the agency.  He said, “People tend to come on time and it enables flexible working operations. Now with the COVID-19 situation in Indonesia improving, we are once again faced with options on how to conduct our work... Most likely we will be going towards hybrid way of working.” 

On his vision for the agency, Nurarifin hopes for PINC to become “the catalyst for [its agencies] and people to grow and ever-evolve". To that end, PINC will create leaders, which in turn will create more leaders, Nurarifin said. “As the number of leaders grow, that is how we sustain ourselves. And each of these leaders naturally will find their own style of leadership.” 

On a larger scale, he hopes that the Indonesian ad industry, as a whole, will find a clearer voice of its own this year, noting a rising number of “really good campaigns rooted in Indonesian-ness". He added that he would love to see more energy being focused on campaigns “living and breathing substance within the society” rather than frivolous speculative print ads just for award shows. “Only by focusing on realness and truth we could provide the best value for our clients, the audience, as well as improving Indonesia’s stature on the global creative stage,” he said. 

Related articles:
Behind the name: What does Idenya Flux's name represent?
Behind the name: How Magnus Digital stakes its claim in Indonesia's ad scene