Excitant Healthcare Advertising: 2018
Excitant Healthcare Advertising
1410 Meadowbrook Way
Woodstock, GA 30189
Telephone: 678-357-1127
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: excitanthealthcare.com
Accounts
Account wins 6
Active business clients 6
Brands by 2017 sales
Brand-product accounts held 17
$25 million or less 17
Products not yet approved/launched 1
Services Mix
Consumer advertising 25%
Professional advertising 20%
Sales collateral 20%
Interactive/web 15%
Direct mail (postal or electronic) 15%
Strategic marketing consulting 5%
Client Roster
Galen US
Krona Therapeutics
Marine Ingredients (A KD Pharma Company)
Merz North America
Zoetis
Turning its focus toward small-to-mid-sized clients in 2016 seems to have really paid dividends for Excitant in 2017, executives say. “We saw an opportunity to bring great work and a high level of service to the under $50 million brand segment that was largely underserved and underappreciated,” says Mark Perlotto, president of Excitant. The agency’s seventh year of operation seems to have proven that model as 2017 turned out to be its most successful yet with revenue up more than 50 percent compared with 2016. Along the way Excitant added new clients, gained additional and expanded assignments from established clients and continued to score big at creative awards shows for its work across a wide range of marketing initiatives, according to agency leaders.
Excitant was selected in fourth-quarter 2016 as the creative and strategic agency by Merz North America for its Mederma brand, a well-known line of OTC products for reducing the appearance of scars and stretchmarks, with the majority of the work hitting in 2017. The agency’s extensive work for the brand in 2017 included professional and consumer print advertising, consumer and professional digital advertising, professional digital direct marketing, consumer terrestrial and Pandora radio spots, web video spots, native and social media content, visual and verbal content for initiatives on Amazon, rebranding of established formulations and launching new formulations under the Mederma family, packaging design across the entire product line and redesigning the brand website. Along the way, Excitant won numerous creative awards for the Mederma campaigns including and Rx Club Award for its Mederma AG professional print ad, an Rx Club Award and a Silver Communicator Award for the Mederma Advanced Scar Gel consumer print ad, a Gold Communicator Award for the Mederma Quick Dry Oil professional launch print ad, and the Silver Pharma Choice Award for Best Consumer Website.
The agency was hired in 2017 for a corporate branding and messaging initiative by Marine Ingredients, a KD Pharma Company. Marine Ingredients is a leading supplier of custom-crafted Omega-3 and other nutraceutical products to supplement manufacturers and marketers around the globe. Excitant’s work was then spun out to advertising, collateral, and booth design for Marine’s largest and most important tradeshow of the year.
The agency’s longest-standing client is the diagnostics and reproductive services group within Zoetis, the world’s largest animal health company. Here too the agency continued to enjoy expanding assignments and its winning ways at awards competitions for this client, executives say.
In 2017 the agency supported the launch of two new diagnostic tests added to the WITNESS line of point-of-care veterinary tests and picked up the media planning and buying responsibilities for the diagnostics division. The agency’s creative work for the Zoetis training/service lines of business, PeopleFirst and ProfitSolver, assigned to the agency in 2016, also rolled out in 2017. As in the past, the agency’s animal health creative work continued to gain significant creative praise at awards competitions. The agency’s Zoetis work took home three Rx Club Awards, four Diagnostic Marketing Association Creative Communication Gold Awards, five Silver Communicator Awards and two Bronze VETTY Awards, the only awards competition specifically for animal health marketing.
The agency also worked on developing the launch initiatives including sales collateral, patient communications and packaging design for Natavi, a women’s health brand planned for launch in 2018 by the start-up company Krona Therapeutics.
“Our model of high-touch involvement and commitment to our clients’ brands within a flexible and adaptable framework has proven to be a winner for our clients,” Perlotto says. “It allows us to efficiently support their needs in either an AOR or project-based relationship and to scale up or down to their individual situation.”
According to executives, the agency supports its clients with the core services of strategic planning, creative, and account service with its in-house team of experienced healthcare marketers. For certain segments requiring specific tactical expertise, it relies on established partnerships with companies focused specifically in those areas.
“It made no sense to us to try to build some of those specialized capabilities in-house like many larger agencies and networks have done,” Perlotto says. “Establishing trusted relationships with smaller, more agile experts in those areas that we manage for them brings our clients offerings that are at the leading edge of those technologies without the burden of that overhead. It’s a ‘win-win’ for both the agency and our clients in terms of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.”
Despite the significant growth that Excitant experienced during 2017, its executives do not expect the agency to slow down in 2018.
“The model we operate under has been battle-tested to provide the flexibility that allows us to get up to speed quickly on new assignments and hit the ground running without negatively impacting current work or clients,” Perlotto says. For that reason, the agency sees continued growth in the cards in coming years.
Executives say the Excitant agency team has extensive pharmaceutical experience in the therapeutic areas of Dermatology and Gastroenterology that could be leveraged for client brands, and its past work also reaches deeply into human diagnostics and medical device brands, as well.
“Of course, given the agency’s success in animal health, that too seems like an obvious area for growth,” executives say. “With all those opportunities, it’s a good thing the agency is adaptable and employs a flexible model, because with the success it has had, many clients will likely come knocking on our door.”