CDM New York: 2022

CDM New York 

220 East 42nd Street, Floor 11, New York, NY 10017
cdmny.com

 

QUICK FACTS

Accounts

Account wins 5

Active business clients 26

 

Services Mix

Sales materials 40%
Professional digital/web/mobile/omnichannel 30%
Professional print ads 10%
DTC/DTP digital/web/mobile/omnichannel 10%
DTC/DTP print ads 5%
Data/analytics 5%

 

WINNER

Best Professional Print Campaign

 

FINALIST

Most Admired Agency
DE&I Champion
Best Consumer Web Campaign
Best Digital Physician Campaign
Best Medical Device Campaign
Best Professional Web Campaign
Best Rare Disease Campaign
Best Social Media Campaign

 

 

“Do our employees feel seen and cared for? Do our senior leaders lead with compassion? And have we, together, created space for a more heart-forward culture? These are the questions we’ve been reflecting on over the course of the past year,” says Kristen Gengaro, president of CDM.

2021 marked the first full year under the new leadership of CDM – starting with the orchestrated mid-2020 moves of Sharon Callahan, CEO of CDM, and Gengaro from sister Omnicom agency TBWA\WorldHealth. The early addition of creative powerhouses David Stemler as executive creative director and Bruno Brasileiro and Felipe Munhoz as executive VP, group creative directors, rounded out by the recent hire of Chris Barbee as chief strategy officer and the elevation of Katie Isaacs as managing partner have put CDM on a sharp trajectory of growth this year.

But if you ask this leadership team to comment on recent successes, they will quickly shift the conversation from “growth” to “people.” “We know that if we take care of the people, the rest will follow,” Barbee says. “For any disciples of the Service Profit Chain, you know that having engaged employees leads to happy clients, which leads to agency growth.

However, for this CDM team, it’s not just about a formula for success; it truly is about creating a psychologically safe environment where people have space to be their authentic selves.

“Among other measures of performance, we issue an agency-wide survey every six months to statistically test for employee engagement. In this past round, the highest scores were around our company’s commitment to DE&I as No. 1, and our employees’ ability to show up with authenticity in the workplace as No. 2,” Callahan says. “We could not be prouder of what we’re building here.”

Recent Accomplishments

According to Stemler, CDM has been on the bleeding edge of healthcare marketing for more than 35 years, with the agency having many healthcare “firsts” in its portfolio: the first Super Bowl ad, the first social media campaign, and the first AI effort. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to anyone at CDM that the agency would so intentionally be the first to tackle the topic of inequities in the dermatology field when it saw an unmet need.

As Isaacs reflects, “People of color make up nearly half of the world, but almost none of them are represented in dermatology literature. Due to this, skin conditions in non-white people are not properly diagnosed. To show its continued commitment in dermatology, we partnered with Pfizer to launch ‘Every Color is Primary’: a platform that raises awareness of disease prevalence, presentation, and impact in patients with skin of color, and helps improve equitable diagnosis and treatment of people of all races and ethnicities.”

Gengaro adds, “While CDM is proud of so much of their creative work this past year, perhaps nothing has been more inspiring and more meaningful than the work done on this campaign.”

Structure and Services

As Callahan pointed the team toward the future, she saw the need to make more radical changes in the way they were positioned to deliver on omnichannel for their clients. Enter Michael Austin, CDM’s new chief experience officer. “Michael has been charged with demystifying the concept of omnichannel for employees and clients alike, and to help CDM outpace others in this area,” Callahan says.

Beyond investing in this key role, all CDM employees were given access to Omnicom’s proprietary data stack (including customer insight data, medical claims data, payer and patient data, and culture and trend data). And just recently, the entire agency was closed for mandatory omnichannel training to help give their teams an advantage when pushing their clients’ business forward.

“We know that if we were going to make a lasting impact on the topic of omnichannel, we’d have to drive both structural and behavioral changes,” Callahan says. “We’re thrilled to have Michael on board to help lead us through this important shift in our business.”

Future Plans

“In a visually crowded world, craft is what grabs your attention,” notes Munhoz. Brasileiro adds, “Even as a copywriter, I can acknowledge that craft is an essential part of the message. It creates momentum, sets the tone, and evokes emotions.” And so 2022 marks the launch of the Craftery at CDM – a center of excellence in the agency dedicated to advancing the visual craft of its work.

At CDM, the team believes that craft matters. “And it’s not easy,” agency executives say. “But it’s the thing that makes ads sticky, and it’s worth the persistence and hard work.

“As we continue to build out the Craftery, we are inspired by what’s possible in terms of work that moves our customers to feel something,” Stemler says. “We’re excited to apply this across all of our work to further elevate our creative product here at CDM.”

Philanthropy/Citizenship

In 2021, CDM launched a program called CDMRise – an internship designed to expose diverse talent from local NYC high schools to the heatlhcare advertising industry. “At a time when agencies are all making commitments to bringing in more diverse talent, we wanted to find a way to move upstream and get to the root of the issue: many young, talented, BIPOC creative students are unaware of our industry, and are potentially lacking the guidance and resources to build their first portfolio,” Gengaro says.

The inaugural class of interns was given its own client – the American Heart Association – with a brief to encourage more girls to join science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. The students created a campaign that taught young girls how to repurpose their toys (such as dolls, kitchen kits, etc) and transform them into inspiring tools associated with STEM. And the campaign was incorporated by schools in New York and turned into a part of their curriculum, as an incentive to girls and students in general.

As Gengaro reflects, “This program was born of our employees’ desire to move the needle on DE&I efforts. For me, it’s just one of the many proof points that this organization is authentically heart-forward.”