Digitas Health boosts global presence

July 28, 2009 – 10:03 am by Gina Monari

Digitas Health is growing, officially expanding its global presence with Digitas Health London and Digitas Health Boston. The agency’s expansion suits the needs of its clients with international reach.

“This digital re-engineering that’s taken place in marketing started first in the U.S., but is beginning to broaden around the world,” says David Kramer, CEO, Digitas Health. “At the center of this digital innovation in pharma is the need for efficiencies, as well as the fact that these online media represent such a powerful tool to communicate about health.”

The Digitas Health London office marks the beginning of the agency’s international expansion efforts, beginning in Europe. According to Mr. Kramer, some of the business that Digitas had been doing domestically began to broaden and move across the Atlantic.

The agency has appointed June Dawson as senior VP, managing director. Ms. Dawson was the digital business director for the London office of Ogilvy Healthworld and brings more than a decade of pharmaceutical interactive marketing to the role. Her career has included work in integrated communications, public relations and journalism, and she has led marketing efforts for many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical brands.

Being in the United Kingdom allows Digitas Health closer contact with two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. These companies comprised 10.1% of the global market share in 2007. Pharmaceuticals are one of Britain’s leading manufacturing sectors, bringing in a trade surplus of £4.3 billion ($8.61 billion) in 2007.

“There’s something very special about the creative culture in London from a pan-European perspective,” says Larry Mickelberg, executive VP, strategy and new business, Digitas Health. “The edginess that we’ve come to admire and enjoy from our colleagues in London is something that we’re very much looking forward to infusing in Digitas Health throughout our offices. This is a strategic, creative, and a technological play for us.”

Just as in the United States, Digitas Health London is digital at the core and aims to build agency-of-record status with clients. Having a London presence will also benefit the overall culture of the Digitas Health network.

“My role here is to focus on helping our clients in the U.S. to expand into Europe,” Ms. Dawson told Med Ad News. “I will be driving the development of existing business, as well as looking at growing business. Budgets here in Europe for digital marketing communications are still buoyant and increasingly brands are working in this space to maximize their marketing spend. Investment is transitioning from traditional media to digital channels.”

The European market is complex and individual. Many of the major brands use London as their central hub for marketing communications.

“I joined because there isn’t another network quite like Digitas Health in Europe,” Ms. Dawson says. “A huge difference between healthcare marketing here is that we don’t have DTC, but are expert in building disease education and awareness initiatives.”

A simultaneous expansion to Boston provides Digitas the opportunity to reach the talented people within Digitas and beyond who have healthcare and emerging media experience and the significant interest to expand the Digitas Health concept for clients across the globe. With the abundance of life science companies and a large selection of universities and leading scientific research institutions, Boston ranks No. 1 one on the list of the largest life science clusters in the U.S. With more than 700 pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotech companies, Massachusetts is also first in the nation in the number of life-sciences patents per capita.

As the nature of healthcare marketing becomes more sophisticated, Digitas Health is eager to draw on the skill sets of those who have launched some the world’s most creative and successful marketing campaigns for clients across leading consumer industries — such as automotive, hospitality, and finance — and to share that knowledge base across the agency. Digitas Health Boston is located within the Boston headquarters of parent company Digitas, which offers a deep reservoir of talent and represents an important extension of the health brand’s domestic footprint. The agency is looking forward to the Digitas Health Boston practice being able to take advantage of the skill sets and experience in creating very large-scale digital productions on behalf of clients

Serving as the lead marketing and creative executives in Boston are Kirk Williamson, senior VP, marketing; and Michael Tiedemann, senior VP, creative. Mr. Williamson brings 18 years of consumer and healthcare marketing and general management experience to the role, including several years with Gillette/Procter & Gamble, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., and Frito-Lay. In addition, he served as an independent consultant in the consumer health and device markets.

As creative lead, Mr. Tiedemann transitioned to the role from parent company Digitas, where he had worked for a decade as the relationship creative lead for many of the company’s highest profile clients in the automotive and financial services industries. As creative director for the Digital Solutions Group at Prodigious, a Digitas company and the world’s only standalone global digital productions company, Mr. Tiedemann standardized the user experiences across multiple brands for a major client

Physical expansion is not the only way Digitas Health wants to grow. Mr. Mickelberg says Digitas expects to do more original research and thought leadership work with the goal of continuing to drive a point of view on the evolution of healthcare marketing.

“That’s something that we’ve stood for since the beginning of Digitas Health and something we will continue to expand now in new geographies,” Mr. Mickelberg told Med Ad News.

In each of the last three years the agency has experienced increased annual revenue growth of about 50%, and in the past year alone, the agency has achieved 14 new client brand wins. Mr. Mickelberg says the agency has been broadening service offerings to existing clients and to new clients during and before the past 12 months.

“Starting really as a digital agency, we’ve been adding services in the areas of social marketing, in the areas of mobile marketing, and in the areas underlying search and media for years,” Mr. Mickelberg told Med Ad News. “We continue to add a range of services that are geared really more toward traditional marketing venues like television and print and others. We’ve been on a journey to really become — by any definition — a full-service marketing agency with digital at the core of everything we do.”