Evoke: 2022

Evoke

300 Vesey Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10282
212-228-7200 • [email protected] • evokegroup.com

 

QUICK FACTS

Accounts
Active business clients 100

Brands by 2021 sales
Brand-product accounts held 255

 

Services Mix

Professional advertising (Personal + NPP, includes digital, interactive, relationship marketing, and
medical education) 38%
Consumer advertising (DTC/DTP, includes digital, interactive, and relationship marketing) 35%
Public relations/communications 19%
Payer 6%
Media 2%

 

Management describes Evoke, founded in 2006, as a full-service global marketing, media, and communications agency “purpose-built to navigate today’s complex healthcare landscape.” The agency has a growing number of 850 professionals across nine global offices: New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Princeton, Chicago, Los Angeles, Raleigh, London, and Dublin.

“Natively digital and data-driven, creatively curious, and fully dedicated to the health and wellness industry, Evoke works with the top 10 biopharma companies in the world, innovative and emerging biotechs, consumer health companies, and public health organizations. We are committed to building solutions that genuinely change lives, careers, and businesses, united by a clear vision of making Health More Human.”

Recent Accomplishments

For Evoke, 2021 was a year defined by growth, transformation, and innovation, the leadership team says. “In addition to exceeding forecasted revenue growth, we made significant headway in transforming our agency benefits and making our organization more inclusive, along with delivering innovation across our marketing, customer experience, media, and data capabilities.”

To start, Evoke prioritized its staff development and learning by doubling investment in training this past year. “We introduced Evoke Academy and Pharma School – two types of ongoing education series that managers can tailor to individual development plans to ensure our people build both knowledge and careers.”

Evoke managers stated, “We hired a Chief Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Officer, Karla Anderson, and built a global, dedicated DEI team who have launched a progressive DEI strategy including extensive training, internal communications, and a calendar of DEI experiences all with a firm focus on both education and action – we didn’t just learn, we started an internal journey to become of the most inclusive businesses in our industry and beyond.”

Evoke increased its internal communications “so every employee knows the direction we are working toward, their role in our success, and where to access the support we have to help them be their best at work.”

And in line with leaders’ belief that the agency has a leadership role within the industry and healthcare, Evoke invested in its industry partnerships, including the HBA, 4A’s, and multiple non-profit organizations that support equity in healthcare.

Management says new talent continues to drive Evoke’s growth. “Our success in 2020 enabled us to make 2021 the year where we significantly increased our people capital and brought in some of the industry’s brightest and boldest names.” These include Chief Client Officer Eric Daly, Chief Innovation Officer Will Reese, VP, People and Culture Deanna Smith, Chief Creative Officer, NA Rachel McCready, Chief Strategy Officer, NA Alexis Penty, and VP, Creative and Multicultural Content Strategy Lisa Llewellyn.

“Evoke remains committed to standing out from our competitors when it comes to being a workplace where people can thrive both inside and out,” the leadership team says. “As we entered another year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we continued to leverage our agility and rally around new norms, starting by formalizing a ‘Work Where You Work Best’ policy that enables all employees to work where best for them – we have seen staff use this as an opportunity to make changes that benefit not only them but their families and, unlike with other businesses, this policy will remain in place after pandemic restrictions end.”

Management says, “We have continued to build a thriving remote culture with nimble and collaborative day-to-day operations (introducing new frictionless working technologies, including the online collaborative whiteboard platform, Miro) and creating an employee experience with genuinely people-focused moments (holiday contests, Super Bowl squares, Employee Appreciation Day gift cards, etc.). We have re-imagined and expanded our talent acquisition and onboarding programs to allow us to attract and retain the best talent in the industry without the constraints of in-person work. We also welcome new hires to the agency with personalized welcome swag kits mailed directly to their home before their start date.”

Leaders say while growing the agency and enhancing internal processes, they didn’t take their eyes off changing client needs and adapting service offering to serve them. “We proudly launched a Multicultural Marketing Center of Excellence, an internal talent network and hub of subject matter experts with a clear mission to help overcome the health disparities that we see within some of the country’s most vulnerable patient populations. This core group of SMEs work across agency teams to infuse multicultural strategy, thinking, and perspective into everything we do. Projects over the last year have seen us reaching, connecting with, and supporting positive health behavior change within multicultural audiences to improve health outcomes in a range of therapy areas, from oncology and rare diseases to maternal health and fertility.”

With customer experience (CX) being a foundation of Evoke’s overall offering and approach to solving clients’ most difficult commercial challenges, managers say the agency continued to invest heavily in this capability through extensive recruitment and developing a series of proprietary CX tools, processes, and platforms to more deeply understand customer journeys and the drivers that create the known behaviors in markets. “Highlights of this include a data science process for analyzing macro linguistics (text-based) data; a process for analyzing call center data as a source of quantitative data; an enterprise data enablement strategy to inform the overarching objectives for an entire business (supply chain, e-commerce, marketing, sales, etc.); and lastly, we produced Evoke’s first suite of change management products to socialize new processes for approaching data across a business.”

Agency leaders maintain that the investments in applied innovation didn’t stop there.

“Evoke’s continued development of Proprietary Ad Tech takes an innovative entrepreneurial approach when it comes to challenging the status quo in how media is planned and bought,” executives say. “Making an impact on both the professional and consumer sides, Audience Verification, one, delivers specific engagement information for the HCP audience by specific NPI number after branded exposure and brand website visitation, and, two, serves as a transparent optimizer in finding new target audience segments without exposing any PII based on intent. This is truly a unique capability in the space, and results have outperformed other marketplace/competitive agency solutions.”

Managers say all of this investment in people, products, and processes resulted in multiple awards and widespread industry recognition. For example, Evoke was named a Crain’s Best Places to Work NYC for the 7th year in a row; O’Dwyer was named one of MM+M’s Women of Distinction 2022; and Evoke KYNE was named PRovoke’s 2021 Global Healthcare Agency of the Year, 2021 EMEA Healthcare Consultancy of the Year, and 2021 North America Healthcare Agency of the Year. They also took home Communications Consultancy of the Year by Communiqué. Additionally, Evoke KYNE’s CEO, David Kyne, was named a PRWeek 2021 Health Influencer, and Kate Callan, EVP, head of social media, was named to MM+M’s 40 Under 40.

Structure and Services

Creative curiosity, data-driven mindset, digital DNA, and a full-service global healthcare marketing, communications, and media offering put Evoke in a unique position in the market with a differentiating partnership model,” the leadership team states. “As one agency, its structure creates connectivity across the entire offering. It allows teams to be nimble when working across disciplines and service areas, including: Consumer & Patient, Healthcare Professional, Market Access, Communications & PR, Digital & Multichannel Marketing, Media & Analytics. All bound by the common purpose to make ‘Health More Human.’

Future Plans

Evoke continues to set ambitious goals for growth across every aspect of its business, according to the leadership team. “We will further expand our offerings and grow our Multicultural Marketing practice. Our DEI and HR teams will continue to grow as we set out to be the best hybrid remote/in-person agency that believes in putting its people first. As a future-focused agency, Evoke remains aligned to innovation across CX, data & analytics, mar-tech, and identifying and maximizing influencers to shape the brand and corporate reputations to help clients stay ahead of the curve and lead in this ever-changing health landscape.”

Philanthropy/Citizenship

In support of its mission to make “Health more Human,” management says Evoke stands by its promise to advance equity within the health industry, and has taken actionable steps to continue moving this initiative forward.

“We have donated and partnered with multiple health non-profits, including Equalize Health – a global not for profit medical technology company on a mission to ensure that everyone, no matter where they are in the world, has access to world-class medical treatment; CancerCare – the leading national organization providing free professional support services and information to help people manage the emotional, practical and financial challenges of cancer; and Goodbye Malaria to support its mission to eliminate malaria in Africa, a preventable disease that kills a child every two minutes in Southern Africa,” Evoke managers say.

“And our leadership walked the walk with our own David Kyne traveling to Africa in February 2022 in support of Goodbye Malaria and the people of Africa; carrying out humanitarian and environmental work in sub-Saharan Africa to help with malaria prevention, wildlife conservation, water purification, early childhood development, and eye tests and reading glasses for elders in remote communities.”

Evoke has additionally taken on close to $1 million of pro bono work that the agency is unable to discuss at this time, “but look out for some exciting news on our life-changing campaigns later this year!”