Heartbeat: 2019

 

Heartbeat

1675 Broadway
New York, NY 10019

Telephone
212-812-2233
E-mail
[email protected]
Website
weareheartbeat.com

Quick Facts
Accounts
Account wins 11
Active business clients 14

Brands by 2018 sales
Brand-product accounts held 29

Services mix
Integrated marketing 80%
Digital 20%

 

 

Heartbeat introduced a new positioning several years ago: The Agency for Challenger Brands. “For most agencies, this might feel like a narrow focus, even a radical positioning,” Heartbeat executives say. “But such discipline has invigorated Heartbeat, increasing our growth and expanding our creative thinking.”
Agency leaders ask, “So just what made us feel confident enough to overtly ask for, what many would call, ‘the tough cases’ – the ones that the traditional pharma marketing playbook would doom to mediocrity? When we looked back at our greatest successes, we saw engagements where the brands all had a steep hill to climb – whether it was a 14th-to-market neurology launch, a rare disease treatment that was underused because of diagnosis difficulties, or a little-known aesthetics company taking on an established duopoly.”
According to Managing Director and Executive Planning Director Nadine Leonard, “To overcome the odds in these instances, we couldn’t rely on the marketing tactics and mindsets that are often typical in healthcare. Instead we had to be crafty and take calculated risks – a mindset that had been deeply ingrained in Heartbeat since our founding. The results were overwhelming: the 14th-to-market brand achieved blockbuster status in its first year and was recently deemed the most successful launch in the global healthcare company’s history; the rare disease drug was named Brand of the Year by Pharmaceutical Executive; and the small aesthetics company snagged significant market share from its bigger competitors and had a successful IPO.”

Recent accomplishments

Heartbeat executives say this formalized focus as The Agency for Challenger Brands “is offering us more opportunities to do our best work – and it’s been met with open arms. In the last 15 months, Heartbeat has added several significant challenger brands to our client roster. We deepened our expertise in traditional pharma categories – women’s health, neurology, endocrinology – and we also strengthened our foothold in the medical-device world, with the addition of brands in the global device and patient-monitoring spaces. We expanded work with several current partners, and new clients came knocking after seeing the agency achieve success with other brands within their respective organizations.”
According to agency leaders, “most exciting” has been the embrace of challenger thinking by brands that would not classically be labeled as such.
“We actively work with several partners who are considered to be at the top of their respective games – and want to stay that way,” says Managing Director and Executive Creative Director James Talerico. “These marketers are dissatisfied with the status quo and motivated to overturn it. To do so, they recognize the need to behave like a challenger.”
2018 was exciting in many other ways, management says, as the agency launched three new indications and debuted a virtual-reality-based patient experience for an oncology brand; introduced a new entrant into the highly scrutinized pain-treatment landscape; and created the first-ever patient social media campaign for a leading cardiology treatment.
The agency has added several new layers of expertise to better serve challenger brands. Heartbeat welcomed 25-year industry veteran Kimberly Romagnola into the role of Relationship Lead, where she is uniting brand leaders and internal teams in their work on brands in the oncology and cardiology spaces. “Other notable new Heartbeaters include Henry Anderson, who is leading the agency’s social media discipline, and Hudson Plumb, who is spearheading our unique focus on delivering value at the point-of-care through our Workflow-Enabled Solutions,” agency executives say.
“In addition to all of this, and despite all the hard work going on, we took special care to ensure that employee happiness and engagement remained at an all-time high – and it did, as we were one of only nine agencies nationwide to receive MM&M’s first-ever ‘Best Place to Work’ designation,” agency leaders say. “This accolade made it a repeat for us, after being the only healthcare agency to be recognized by Ad Age for their Best Places to Work list in 2017.”

STRUCTURE AND SERVICES

Agency leadership says in addition to providing end-to-end AOR services that create opportunities for stronger and more efficient campaigns, Heartbeat has focused on augmenting a unique discipline that has the ability to be a game-changer for challenger brands: Workflow-Enabled Solutions.
“This marketing effort centers around creating value for patients and providers, first at the point of care and then beyond,” management says. “By introducing smart services within the medium where physicians are spending the majority of their time – the electronic health record (EHR) – a pharma brand can maximize its treatment’s ability to deliver on clinical goals.
“Whether that’s through offering clinical decision support during the appointment, or creating ‘prescribable programs’ that keep the patient and doctor better connected after the visit, these services offer value that has the ability to facilitate better outcomes – earning appreciation from physicians and adherence from patients,” Leonard says.

FUTURE PLANS

Agency leadership says “another thing that stood out to us when we reflected on our greatest successes was a positive, motivating client/agency experience.”
“Working with challenger brands often means playing a high-stakes game – the expectations and motivating forces are massive,” Talerico says. “Thus, the strategic thinking and creative approach can be nothing less than razor-sharp. Clearing the road of any friction points is not just a desire – it is a necessity.”
So, in 2019, that is precisely where Heartbeat will be making its biggest investment: examining and polishing every touchpoint the agency has with its clients, management says. According to Leonard, “Our goal is simple: a groove-smooth working experience that removes all practical obstacles to the best strategic and creative thinking.”
Does a client need to make a strategic marketing decision during a meeting? According to agency leaders, Heartbeat will look for opportunities to make that process easier, faster, more productive – whether it’s devising insightful ways to reframe the question or ensuring that decision-makers have what they need to know right in front of them during the discussion. “Another example: when a marketing initiative is completed, we want to do more than just celebrate and socialize the end product within the client’s organization,” agency executives say. “Instead, we’re exploring ways to ‘memorialize’ the decision-making and strategic rationale that led to that final product. This allows for deeper appreciation of what was achieved, as well as a mechanism for capturing important intellectual property for new team members and future projects.”
Ultimately, the leadership team says they see 2019 as the year to fine-tune the dials on the challenger approach, “further crystallizing for clients the unique POV and customer experience Heartbeat brings to the table.”