BullsEye Healthcare LLC

1719 Route 10, Suite 219
Parsippany, NJ 07054

Telephone
973-290-0033

Website
bullseyehealthcare.com

Quick Facts
Accounts
Active business clients 2

Brands by 2018 sales
Brand-product accounts held 1
$25 million-$50 million 1

Services mix
Professional 100%

Client roster
Heron Therapeutics Inc.
Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals
Portola Pharmaceuticals

 

BullsEye Healthcare LLC celebrates the agency’s 12th year in business this year. BullsEye remains an independent, full-service communication company that focuses on finding insights and ideas and providing innovative strategic thinking for its clients, agency executives say.
Guy D. Dess and Al Paz, the founding partners, say they bring to each brand they are assigned a long history of marketing and advertising successes, and share a passion for achieving a deep understanding of their clients’ issues. According to them, their mantra continues to be: come up with insights, ideas, and innovation that will help their clients achieve rapid market penetration and sustained market share growth.
Operating as a boutique, full-service independent agency, BullsEye principals commit themselves to working with each client to achieve their goals. “Our method of engagement, having the principals of the agency working very closely with the people on the brand team and immersing ourselves in the data, yields insights that clients say they don’t get from large network agencies,” Paz says.
Agency managers say BullsEye strives to find and exploit, or create, a critical issue in a given market in order to change target customer’s behavior and capture a greater market share for clients’ brands.

Recent accomplishments

Heron Therapeutics is developing novel, patient-focused solutions that apply the commercial-stage biotechnology’s innovative science and technologies to already-approved pharmacological agents for patients suffering from cancer or pain. HTX-011 is in development for application into the surgical site to reduce postoperative pain and the need for opioid analgesics for 72 hours. The product was granted Fast Track Designation from the FDA in the fourth quarter of 2017 and Breakthrough Therapy Designation from the FDA in the second quarter of 2018.
Heron recently submitted an NDA to the FDA for HTX-011. The FDA granted Priority Review designation in December 2018 and set a Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) goal date of April 30, 2019. The team at Bulls­Eye continues to work on strategic analysis, offering insights and ideas for this exciting new compound.
Portola Pharmaceuticals’ first medicine Bevyxxa (betrixaban), an oral, once-daily Factor Xa inhibitor, was approved by FDA in June 2017. Andexxa – the first and only antidote indicated for patients treated with rivaroxaban or apixaban, when reversal of anticoagulation is needed due to life-threatening or uncontrolled bleeding – received both U.S. Orphan Drug and FDA Breakthrough Therapy designations. Andexxa was approved May 3, 2018 under the FDA’s Accelerated Approval pathway. Bulls­Eye worked with the team at Portola from the time the drug was in Phase I, coordinating, implementing, and executing a sophisticated launch plan for this breakthrough product.
“Hospital drugs always face challenges, even if they are new and exciting compounds, due to the way formularies are structured,” Paz says. “New drugs are not necessarily rapidly adopted. We felt very privileged and proud to have been a part of the team that successfully brought this highly anticipated therapeutic agent to the market.”
Executives at BullsEye helped develop the launch strategy and tactics. The agency created a suite of marketing materials to support the launch, including core messages and value proposition, the product logo, digital ads, journal ads, website, a host of collateral material, and brand guidelines. The campaign was centered around the distinctive, iconic emergency box showing-casing the product.
“The patients who need this drug are suffering from life-threatening or uncontrolled bleeding and need their situation reversed,” Dess says. “We felt it was imperative to have an image that healthcare providers would recognize as something they can turn to in an emergency. What better than an emergency box?”
In addition to the promotional and collateral materials, the agency designed and executed an innovative print and digital media plan to drive inquires to the website.

STRUCTURE AND SERVICES

BullsEye Healthcare offers a full suite of marketing and branding services ranging from strategic consulting, advertising, professional and patient-marketing materials, branding, promotional materials to AD boards, and Web and social network services.
According to managers, the agency has furthered expanded its agreement with an internet, audience network development company that allows BullsEye Healthcare clients to deliver their message to potential targets at the right place, time, and price wherever they are within the digital landscape. “We now have a very unique and cutting-edge marketing tool that can help benefit our clients,” Paz says. “It allows us to refine and optimize customer engagement, drive communication continuity and loyalty for our clients’ brands or services.”
Management says strategic marketing services, branding, and advertising continue to make up the key components of the agency’s offering, including its proprietary BrandStory process. However, the agency is adept at working across all communication platforms, and the principals have also made a dedicated decision to hone its expertise in the basics, referred to as science-based marketing. BullsEye managers believe that the advertising services market is supersaturated with offerings for consumer engagement, message integration, social media platforms and social applications to enhance customer engagement. Their view is that the rapid penetration and acceptance of these services has made them no more than commodities.
These are all the “hot” tools of the trade, available at varying price points, according to Dess. “The danger for clients is that there is a tendency for agencies to confuse their comprehension of the tools they use with their ability to understand a client’s problem and its complexities,” he says.
The principals at BullsEye still maintain their belief that high-level strategic thinking about the compound their client is trying to market, and innovative ways to do so is still what clients appreciate when all is said and done.
Indeed, Dess and Paz say the pharma industry possesses its own unique business paradigm and this fact should not be glossed over. The depth at which an agency can interact with a client’s business structure will determine the value an agency can contribute to a brand, they say.
“As has become apparent, social media is not necessarily the answer to a marketing problem,” Dess says.
According to Paz, “All the processes and marketing acumen at our agency is focused on allowing clients to achieve brand adoption at any point along the commercialization continuum.”
The leadership team says the agency works with clients who have products at the beginning of their lifecycle, in Phase II, all the way through launch and re-launch, and it provides brand management and strategic input for each step. The BullsEye team works with a dedicated core group of consultants and partners with whom they have worked throughout their careers. Research consultants, scientists, and public policy experts help them provide the highest level of thinking to their clients.

FUTURE PLANS

Throughout its 12 years in business the agency has not focused on growth, in terms of adding multiple new clients, as such. “Our goal has never been to become a big agency like the ones we left,” Dess says. “Our goal has been to remain a high-level strategic, boutique shop, grow our client’s brands and provide our partners with the ideas, insights and innovative thinking that helps to accomplish that.”