Marking a Convergence: A Q&A with Evoke’s Reid Connolly

 

Evoke Group this week changed its structure to now become Evoke. Med Ad News spoke with Reid Connolly, CEO of Evoke, about some of the thinking behind the change and what it means for the agency’s clients.

 

Med Ad News: Why did Evoke Group now become Evoke?

Reid Connolly: Over the last several years, we’ve built a group of some of the leading agencies in their respective spaces. More and more, a few industry trends have been reshaping how we’ve been going to market and how we engage with our clients. The healthcare market — how you market to consumers and professionals and payers; how earned media and paid media have made the healthcare market far more complex for clients to manage as well as giving downward pressure internally for pharma clients — has made a shift to working with fewer agencies with larger remits. And what we’ve done over the past couple of years, starting with Evoke Health, the largest agency within Evoke Group, is build a number of specialist agencies that are phenomenal at what they do but can also work across channels and across audiences. And what we’ve found over the last two years as we’ve been “working with clients as they look for larger remits with fewer partners, we’ve found that we’ve been working with those clients far more as Evoke Group than we have as the sub-brands.

So to formalize that and create a more simplified and singular brand voice for the agency, we wanted to create one singular global agency brand. Whether clients are interacting with us across consumer, professional, market access, PR, or media, in the U.S. or globally, they know Evoke is who they’re going to work with. And so far, we’ve had a really positive reaction about that.

Med Ad News: So all of the sub agencies, Evoke Health, Nitrogen Health, Fabric, Tonic Life Communications, etc., are all those names still existing or are you adding Evoke to them as you have with Evoke Giant?

Reid Connolly: All of the agencies, the way we’re moving now, will be aligned into Evoke. The vast majority of the names you’ve just mentioned will go away, and all of those entities and all of that great talent and experience will be part of Evoke proper. And then there will be cases such as Giant, especially since they’re a newer member of the team, that have a legacy and fantastic brand equity that we want to make sure we maintain. That’s why we made the decision to co-brand, but still have them as part of the Evoke brand as well.

We already are quite integrated and it allows us to work more seamlessly with clients and their business. It was rare that we were working with clients with just one Evoke agency, often it was two or three at a time. It not only simplifies things for clients, but for prospective employees. And when you look at economies of scale, we’re talking over 550 people across eight offices across the globe, some serious scale here, which is really important now more than ever when some of the largest players on the client side are really looking for ways to consolidate their businesses and their brands with agencies that not just have the scale of business — because there are lots of agencies that have scale — but have strategic activity of different types of expertise that can work together legitimately, not just have dots on a map. Some may claim to have expertise here and there, but we have a team of 550 people that can work together, have worked together across geographies and across disciplines. To me that’s compelling, and clients seem to be responding well to that.

Med Ad News: How are clients responding to this new structure?

Reid Connolly: Client reaction has been extremely positive so far. First off, every client has been assured that there are no changes to their existing teams, which everyone wants to know because we have fantastic people in place. There are clients who have historically worked only with Evoke Health, for example, on consumer or digital, or who have worked with Tonic just on PR, but now they get the stronger feeling that they can avail themselves of much broader services and their agency will do even more to provide a higher level of service and a broader range of skills to make their brands even more successful in the marketplace.

Med Ad News: Have you changed the visual branding for Evoke?

Reid Connolly: Yes, there is new visual branding, if you go to the website and the press release section of the website, there’s a little more explanation about the mark itself, the icon. But it’s really about convergence. We’ve always been about how health and humanity coming together, and now it’s about the amazing talent and skill and legacy of the various agencies in the group to create one singular entity. For us, we’ve always been about evolving and trying to create what’s next and what’s better for our clients to get ahead of where the industry is, and it’s a great visual representation of where we need to be going.