Elevate Healthcare: 2017

 

Elevate Healthcare
930 Harvest Drive, Suite 430
Blue Bell, PA 19422
Telephone: 215-710-1077
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: elevatehc.com

 

Finalist

Best Medical Device Campaign

 

Accounts
Account wins    7
Active business clients    7

Brands by 2016 sales
Brand-product accounts held    14
$25 million or less    3
$25 million to $50 million    2
$50 million to $100 million    4
Products yet to be approved/launched    5

 

Services Mix

Marketing Communications     100%

 

Client Roster

Eisai
Kaleo
Novum Pharmaceuticals
Steris

 

 

Elevating healthcare marketing is an ambitious mission, but former agency presidents and now agency founders Frank X. Powers and Lorna Weir say they are up for the challenge, dedicating their energies and futures to creating a healthcare marketing organization that elevates the brand value, sales performance, and reputation of their clients. According to Powers and Weir, they have created a company structure that meets the need for a new way of working with clients.

“At this stage in the healthcare industry’s evolution, clients need a different, more innovative way of working with strategic and marketing partners,” agency leaders say. “Brand value must now be defined to address increasing pressure around cost, the interests and needs of multiple stakeholders, and a myriad of new technologies and expectations. All this and more must be done with less. Therefore, brands today require a partner with a specific set of skills: category expertise, multidisciplinary talent, complete commitment, and a willingness to offer scalability and flexibility as they navigate the path to being competitive.”

According to its executives, the unique structure of Elevate allows it to be what clients need in their development paths – strategic practice, think tank, idea incubator, marketing agency, and creative arsenal.

Early on, agency leaders say, Elevate recognized that identifying the best solutions for its clients could be achieved more efficiently and successfully with a leaner, more experienced senior team of strategists who bring immediate value in a highly focused manner.

“This requires top people from multiple disciplines all working together to provide a comprehensive view of the complexities of a dynamic healthcare landscape to more quickly identify business and brand opportunities that can have a significant impact on a client’s business, then translate, transform, and elevate the promise of those opportunities into real-world success,” management says. “This is particularly true for challenger brands, an area of expertise for Elevate.”

The company founders say they believe in this mission and model so much they named their agency after it. “When we began planning our model, our mission and vision made it very clear that there was no other choice but to name our new venture ‘Elevate,’ clearly communicating the benefit we offer to clients,” Powers says.

The Year’s Accomplishments

Creating innovation in the agency business  by changing the agency business model may be the first and biggest accomplishment of the year for Elevate, according to management. In its first official year of existence, Elevate was named one of the most innovative start-ups in healthcare, as well as already achieving the status of being one of the top 100 agencies, executives say.
Employing this new model has helped Elevate achieve rapid ascension, landing major creative assignments and agency-of-record business from the leadership of several national and international healthcare companies, executives say, and putting the Elevate model into action has resulted in a wide range of assignments for this growing firm.

Management points to Elevate’s work with a global surgical and capital equipment manufacturer as one example. The agency created a C-suite-level strategic assignment helping a key business unit establish its mission, vision, position, and brand architecture. To achieve this, Elevate used a unique combination of internal and external research, workshopping, and perceptual mapping.

Elevate has also been awarded multiple AOR assignments, most recently with a growing pharma company in the dynamic opioid overdose space, a dermatology company with multiple brands, and an emerging biotech preparing to launch its first brand in a well-entrenched category of more mature, larger market leaders, according to executives.

Agency leaders additionally say one of their most impressive major accomplishments was to build a team of senior visionary talent – the key element that makes the Elevate model work. “We have been extremely fortunate to be able to tap into and bring on some of the most talented, respected people in the industry in all disciplines as our full-time associates, from creative to scientific to project delivery to client engagement to operations,” Weir says.   

A short list of key players helping to build the agency’s expertise includes former Dudnyk Chief Creative Officer Barry Schmader; former Calcium USA Chief People Officer Lisa Tamborello; former scientific lead at Vox Medica, Kathleen Nelson Ph.D.; Client Delivery Lead Erin Hlivia; and most recently Regina C. Brown, former account services lead at HB4, to be director of client engagement.

“We recruited the best and brightest people we knew, all of them with amazing talent in their own disciplines, but also all top-tier strategic thinkers and incredibly committed individuals who share our vision,” Weir explains. “That was one of our first and most important accomplishments.”

Structure & Services

Elevate is disrupting the definition of the traditional agency and transforming healthcare marketing by adapting a key principle of peer-to-peer commerce in the agency world – improving and enhancing a robust interface between individuals to more efficiently accomplish mutual goals, management says.

“Elevate is an innovative, one year-young agency that eschews traditional agency models, traditions, and formulas for a focus on providing strategic counsel through peer-to-peer interaction between clients and their team of multidisciplinary, deeply experienced, and visionary senior talent – like Schmader and Nelson,” executives say.

Structuring its model in a new way creates two immediate benefits for Elevate and its clients. “Both parties in the engagement are liberated from the need for multiple layers of varying experience levels, time-consuming onboarding processes, and steep learning curves. We can provide a deeper level of interaction and a higher degree of agility, focusing completely on the challenge at hand,” Powers says. “We dig in quicker, respond to a client’s marketing or strategic challenge more thoroughly, and pivot to provide potential solutions faster.”

To be responsive to client needs and to provide the most value, the Elevate “operating system” increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility, agency leaders say. Most important, it allows for Elevate to reorganize itself as client needs demand. “Scaling up is sometimes necessary depending on a company’s or a brand’s lifecycle, but just as often, we are adept at keeping the scale in line with what our clients need at any given time,” Weir says.

Future Plans

Agency executives paint a bright picture for Elevate going forward, with multiple AOR assignments already on the books for 2017 and 2018. Launches planned into 2019 should keep things hopping, and Powers and Weir say they are committed to servicing these accounts with the utmost quality, maintaining commitment to the Elevate model. According to Powers, “We are being true to our vision by dedicating ourselves to helping clients solve marketing challenges to optimize opportunities at critical junctures in their brand’s development.”

Philanthropy/Citizenship

One key objective at Elevate is to be a force for positive change in its everyday marketing efforts, according to agency leaders. “Elevate isn’t just a name, it’s an imperative,” executives say.

Elevate seeks to work locally and regionally with organizations that feel similarly about public good, providing pro bono strategic marketing counsel, creative campaigns, responsive website design, and collateral materials. Examples of Elevate’s work in the community include Leadership Philadelphia, an organization dedicated to tapping private sector talent to serve community needs; the Pathway School, a not-for-profit approved private school founded in 1961 serving students with autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disabilities, serious emotional disturbance, and other neurological impairments; and the FIRE Foundation, an organization that provides college scholarships (technical schools and community or 4-year colleges) for youths 15 to 20 years of age to help them get a stronger start in life. Elevate also is a proud donor to the ALS Foundation in honor of one of their former colleagues who passed away from ALS.