Fingerpaint acquires Splice

Fingerpaint acquired Splice, a healthcare communications business based in Emeryville, California. 

Fingerpaint is known for its innovative and data-driven approach to providing analytics-enabled, integrated marketing solutions to a growing roster of healthcare clients, specifically in the pharmaceutical, rare disease, and gene therapy sectors. Management says the acquisition and full integration of Splice into the Fingerpaint brand will bolster the company, give it a footprint on the West Coast, and support its continued commitment to being a best-in-class commercialization services provider for biopharma.

“Splice has built a great company filled with top healthcare communications talent who we are looking forward to welcoming into the Fingerpaint family,” says Bill McEllen, a Fingerpaint partner who also leads the firm’s advertising group. “As Fingerpaint continues to partner with biopharma earlier in the commercialization process, this move will help us grow in a geographical area where biopharma companies are booming.”

Splice Co-Founder Paul Hagopian continues to lead the group’s day-to-day operations, reporting directly to McEllen. Hagopian has nearly 25 years of healthcare communications expertise and held a number of leadership positions prior to founding Splice.

“Fingerpaint’s people-first culture and its award-winning work made for the perfect combination,” Hagopian says. “Integrating into Fingerpaint will allow us to provide new and enhanced services to our clients and growth opportunities for our employees while still maintaining our West Coast roots.”

According to McEllen, Splice’s reputation brought Fingerpaint’s attention to the agency. “It’s a relatively small industry, and reputation is exceedingly important in everything that we do,” he says. “And when you see an organization like Splice, and Paul and the leadership team, and you look and you go, “Wow, they’re a lot like we are” – same cultural base, same foundation of doing great work – it was a natural fit for what we wanted to do to expand our presence on the on the West Coast.”

Bill McEllen and Paul Hagopian

According to Hagopian, “Fingerpaint and the Fingerpaint organization had a lot of the capabilities and services that we needed to complement our team. And that’s important when we’re delivering great work for clients, right? Before we kind of had to kind of beg, borrow, and steal, and be able to leverage relationships to get favors. But now, as part of the Fingerpaint family, we can really be able to provide first-class service.”

Colleen Carter

Colleen Carter, head of corporate marketing and business development at Fingerpaint, says, “The wonderful thing about the Splice capabilities is that they mirror us so beautifully. So we’re both excited about being able to take the best of what we do, and do it even better together. Fingerpaint does have additional capabilities that what we’re now calling now Fingerpaint Bay Area did not have. And so I know that Paul is excited to introduce those capabilities to his current clients, like managed care, like branding, early-stage commercialization, clinical branding, the integration.”

This marks Fingerpaint’s third acquisition in 2021, as Splice joins the market access company 1798 and the branding company Leaderboard Branding in the Fingerpaint family.

“Onward and upward is really the headline there,” McEllen says. “As we think about building something special, we want this to be the place where the best people come to do their best work. We do that by relentlessly protecting what makes us special, and who we are and our culture. And it allows us to attract those people. And it allows us to attract the clients that are going to help us really do good.”