Vertiyo Creative Group Inc. and Vertiyo Health are born. The Battery Park area of New York City welcomes the new full-service branding and marketing agency, which launches its healthcare-specific Website today. Vertiyo Health is a full-service healthcare advertising agency, providing creative marketing solutions for professional and patient audiences in the United States and globally. Agency managers say the small size allows the agency to be more cost effective and nimble than most larger healthcare advertising agencies.

Headed by Marc Scibelli, principal and executive creative director, Vertiyo is focused on providing marketers with a new relationship model that combines traditional agency services with the insight of a digital think tank. Mr. Scibelli founded Vertiyo following a two-year stint as corporate creative director for ALM, a business-to-business integrated media company.

In addition, he has served as senior art director for Walker Digital, parent company of priceline.com, and art director for Cendant Corp. Mr. Scibelli’s agency background includes more than a decade of experience at agencies including EURO RSCG Life Chelsea and McCann Erickson, with a focus on pharmaceutical marketing. His work with pharma clients includes the relaunch of Plavix, serving as lead creative on several global accounts for Boehringer-Ingelheim, and work as lead creative for the launch of Wyeth’s newest antidepressant, Pristiq.

Mr. Scibelli has used Web 2.0 technologies to launch several online businesses, including VirtualAdAgency.com, ScrappyUpstarts.com, and TwitterPromoBuilder.com. He is also an active marketing presence on Twitter.

“Today, marketing success requires the imagination to come up with exciting new ideas, the resourcefulness to know how to test them with minimal risk and resources, and the courage to overcome the status quo,” Mr. Scibelli says. “Vertiyo is pioneering a new agency-as-partner model, providing clients with innovations, such as risk-sharing cooperatives and proprietary digital products, to help their brands move forward.”

Vertiyo Health is run by John DeFranco, president. There are about six people on staff within Vertiyo Health, which launched in June 2009. Mr. DeFranco has more than 25 years of experience in healthcare marketing. Starting out in pharmaceutical sales, he has supervised the launch of global brands including Zyprexa, Synercid, Xenical, Xolair, and Pristiq.

Mr. DeFranco and Mr. Scibelli worked together at EURO RSCG. At that time, Mr. DeFranco served as the executive VP, director, client services, and Mr. Scibelli was an associate creative director.

“I was at Euro RSCG for over six years where I ran the Micardis global business, relaunched Plavix and launched Pristiq, an antidepressant for Wyeth with John,” Mr. Scibelli says.

Phoebe Bravakis is the agency’s lead writer. Ms. Bravakis comes from Saatchi & Saatchi where she was a copy supervisor working on Nexium, Seroquel, and Seroquel XR.

The agency is seeking mid-size pharmaceutical clients who want to partner with senior staff from the larger agency world in a cost-effective and efficient way. Clients are struggling to justify cost to senior management. While the agency is fearful of the commoditization of strategic and creative work in the industry, the agency managers see that there are many inefficiencies that occur in large ad agencies, particularly at the senior levels.

“I think clients respond to the fact that we are a tight-knit group that has come up through the large agency world and want to build a partnership directly with our clients without a lot of politics,” Mr. Scibelli told Med Ad News.

The agency is helping pharmaceutical clients use the digital space and social media particularly to survey the existing level of brand and competitor awareness among prescribers and patients. The agency finds it helpful to define phraseology used by its audience.

“There is a lot of room out there for us as agencies to guide our clients on this,” Mr. Scibelli says. “I’d venture to say not enough is being made at the senior levels to get well invested in this educationally, we’re seeing a sort of atrophy in nineties web marketing thinking.”

Through Vertiyo Health’s digital proprietary products, like tweetpromobuilder.com, clients can build social media programs inexpensively. The independent agency hopes to expand its digital product line within the next five years, while growing slowly and remaining closely aligned with its clients.

On the global front, the agency is working on projects with a German pharmaceutical client and has a have a fair amount of experience in the global space. The agency’s latest account win was from Lupin Pharmaceuticals Inc. Lupin is a top pharmaceutical company in India with marketing headquarters are in Maryland. The client is working with the agency on the upcoming launch of AllerNaze, which will compete in the allergic rhinitis market. In addition, the client has brought several generics to market, as well as some branded products, including Suprax. They also recently acquired the cholesterol-reducing agent, Anatara. Lupin’s nasal brand launch is expected in the second quarter of 2010.

“As their agency of record, our relationship with them has been outstanding, and it really exemplifies our agency model of cost-conscious quality,” Mr. Scibelli told Med Ad News. “We couldn’t be happier partnering with them on a strategic and creative level, and we are incredibly exciting about the upcoming launch.

The agency has several digital properties that were built from the ground up, including tweetpromobuilder.com. This allows marketers and web developers to launch twitter campaigns without writing any code.

“These campaigns are based on a quid pro quo idea — users must send a tweet in order to receive a promotion or link,” Mr. Scibelli told Med Ad News.

The Vertiyo Health blog will feature contributions from Mr. Scibelli, as well as others in the agency. The blog is being used as a vehicle to show the personality of the agency. There will be a few agency-centric stories, such as an upcoming blog about the agency’s recent group photo shoot. The hopes are, however, that there will be more discussions about the agency’s reaction to what is happening in the pharmaceutical marketing world.

“I’ve personally had one or more blogs since 2001, so it just always seemed to make sense,” Mr. Scibelli says.

While the health-specific website does not differ greatly from the general Vertiyo website, the agency has developed a small widget right on the website that allows anyone to quickly search and see what is being said on Twitter about their brand, therapeutic class, or competitors.

“Its a nice entry for anyone new to Twitter or social,” Mr. Scibelli says.