Meet The 2021 Manny Awards MedAdvocate Jury Members
Meet The 2021 Manny Awards MedAdvocate Jury Members
The 32nd Annual Manny Awards, to be held virtually on April 22, 2021, features nearly 30 award categories. Sixteen creative award categories were voted on by leading creative talent throughout the healthcare communications industry via an online forum, with three finalists selected in each category. To help determine the winners, a second level of voting conducted by a carefully vetted jury of industry experts is being conducted by a select judging panel. The “MedAdvocate” jury, which is gathering virtually on March 18, consists of unbiased representatives who analyze the outstanding components of each finalist creative award campaign as part of an inspiring dialogue.
Presenting the 2021 Manny Awards MedAdvocate Jury Members …
Bruno Abner
Bruno Abner
EVP, Chief Creative Officer
Michael Austin
Michael Austin
EVP, Managing Director, Creative
Syneos Health Communications
Michael Austin knows that an advertising agency will save the world one day (soon). That’s because creativity is the only muscle that outmaneuvers the tyranny of the day. And doing that advances the way people experience the world. He has taken advantage of exercising creative license for 20 years as an award-winning creative writer/director and has now honed that muscle as a creative business leader. Today he works across Syneos Health Communications to embolden creative thinking and execution across advertising and PR.
As comfortable roaming around the clinical study report of a yet to launch molecule, as he is in executing a consumer website, as he is in strategizing around the c-suite table at a biotech company, Michael has earned the trust and friendship of his clients. He starts by trusting his own voice. A voice well-crafted by hard earned experience. He began his advertising career a century ago (in 1999) as an administrative assistant looking up medical references on the VIAGRA account.
Having joined the Syneos organization in 2015, Michael first led the creative department for PALIO, which in turn led to leading creative for the GSW NY and LA offices. The work he’s done throughout his career has garnered awards but those aren’t what he covets. He lives to give life to ideas. To birth them. To flight them. To encourage them.
Michael’s favorite question to would-be new clients is, “If you are smart enough to hire us, will you be brave enough to listen to us?”
Tracy Blackwell
Tracy Blackwell
Head of Creative, Cedar Knolls
Fingerpaint
Tracy Blackwell is an integral part of the founding leadership team at the Cedar Knolls, New Jersey office of Fingerpaint, where she heads an incredibly talented and growing creative group. Her guidance has helped the agency to double its revenue each year since it was established in 2018—an accomplishment that, believe it or not, is not new to Tracy. Prior to joining Fingerpaint, she spent more than 20 years at McCann, rising through the creative ranks and, ultimately, holding leadership positions not only in creative, but also in strategy and client service. There, she was part of the team that started and built McCann Echo from a start-up to a team of nearly 200.
Tracy is intuitive and candid by nature, which inspires truly connected teams whose work shines in the marketplace and wins awards along the way. Tracy has earned industry recognition herself, including being named both an HBA Rising Star and Luminary. She received her bachelor’s degree from George Washington University.
Mike Bonilla
Mike Bonilla
Executive Creative Director
A seasoned Executive Creative Director with more than 16 years of experience in healthcare advertising, Mike has worked on everything from PSAs, to high science brands, to patient initiatives across a wide range of therapeutic areas, including mental health, women’s health, GI health, respiratory, neurology, and oncology.
His creative work has been published in industry shows, such as Cannes Lions, One Show, Med Ad News, MM&M, Graphis, The Creative Floor, IPA, and LIA. Michael has previously worked at McCann Health, GSW, and FCB, and led the vision for his creative teams across HCP, DTC, US and Global campaigns.
Continuously learning about new disease states and the unmet needs of both patients and HCPs keeps Mike on his toes. Over the last two years, Mike has led multiple campaign launches — from an HCP-focused unbranded campaign for eosiniphilic esophagitis, to a biologic launch for asthma, to a US and Global launch of an innovative migraine medicine, and a US launch of a rescue medication device for severe hypoglycemia.
Mike’s commitment to strong communication and craft has been recognized in the industry, having previously served on the MM&M jury as well as chairing the Pharma jury at the Global Awards.
Mike has also done many rewarding passion projects with clients, such as Movember, the National Organization for Women, and the Boomer Esiason Foundation.
Mike Brune
Mike Brune
Executive Creative Director
Mike embraces his role as Creative Director bringing a focus that goes beyond his own personal standard for brand-building, to include fostering an environment that empowers others on the team to flourish. An inspired, “all-in” team is the best way to create work that excites clients while moving people to act and markets to shift. Achieving those objectives while building team camaraderie throughout the process are of equal importance to Mike.
Experience
Mike has helped lead the creative charge for a wide range of Ogilvy Health clients for 20+ years. His body of work includes numerous market-shaping campaigns, new product launches and revitalized branding for products ranging from oncology and hospital-based anti-infectives to skin care and mouth rinse. Throughout his nearly 25 years in pharmaceutical marketing, Mike’s passion for crystallizing a brand promise in a way that elicits behavior-changing responses has helped his clients build powerful, enduring brands.
About Mike
Mike and his wife, Anna live in Flemington, NJ. Mike is a life-long fan of the NY Mets, Vikings, NY Rangers…and happily accepts all the sympathy that accompanies those choices. He ensures contact with friends through weekends on the golf course during the day; and works on his “cultural side” through movies, museums, or theater at night.
Eric Delnicki
Eric Delnicki
SVP, Creative Director
Saratoga Springs, NY
Simply put, Eric Delnicki designs communications that get noticed and have impact. His facility for delivering complex information in accessible, understandable visible executions has driven his success in a wide range of communication fields, especially healthcare. He has developed materials for every phase of the product life-cycle, from pre-launch market conditioning and disease awareness through complete launch suites, label expansions, patient retention, and sales training. He’s worked in esoteric specialties such as HIV, oncology, infectious diseases, pain management, and neurology. His work has won regional, national, and international awards. His vast pharmaceutical industry experience encompasses high-science specialties with a focus in market access communications.
EXPERIENCE: Delnicki was with Syneos Health for more than 19 years, including 4 years on the leadership team of the Market Access consultancy. He has also worked in HCP and consumer advertising for a wide range of brands and disease states for patients, healthcare providers, and payers. Previously, he supervised catalog creation and national advertising campaigns for the Orvis Company, and worked at consumer and B2B agencies. Delnicki has extensive experience in the recruitment and management of a wide range of creative vendors, including photographers, freelance artists, and illustrators.
Josh Eastman
Josh Eastman
Group Creative Director
16 years ago, Josh moved to NYC with no money, no contacts, and no idea what healthcare advertising was. With a little bit of hustle, A LOT of luck, and the remarkable patience of generous mentors, he started his journey into the world of HCPs, patients, and important safety information. Along the way Eastman has won a couple handfuls of industry awards, preached the power of balance and patience, and mastered the art of the mighty, magnanimous and mischievous serial comma.
Sam Glasgow
Samantha Glasgow
Creative Director
Purohit Navigation
Sam is the Creative Director at healthcare marketing and strategy firm, Purohit Navigation. She utilizes her industrial design background and unstoppable drive to create breakthrough work. She guides her team as they work with the copy group, ensuring that every project not only achieves its strategic objectives, but pushes creative boundaries with unexpected solutions Hailing from multi-cultural Australasia, Sam’s strong appreciation for cultural diversity broadens her insp
Diane Iler-Smith
Diane Iler-Smith
Chief Creative Officer
Biolumina
Diane leads the creative department at Biolumina, a healthcare advertising agency currently focused in oncology. Overseeing a team of over 70 art directors and copywriters, she is responsible for ensuring the creative quality and integrity of the agency’s work. Diane has a Masters degree in Biology and started her career in advertising as a copywriter. Diane is married to her college lab partner and is the proud mother of 2 millennials. She enjoys discovering new biodynamic wines and prior to the pandemic, listening to podcasts on her drive into the NYC, and spending time with family and friends.
Marcus “Kawa” Kawamura
Marcus “Kawa” Kawamura
Executive Creative Director
AREA 23
Marcus “Kawa” Kawamura joined AREA 23, an FCB Health Network Company, in December 2020 as executive creative director, reporting to chief creative officer Tim Hawkey. Kawamura develops groundbreaking ideas that help clients reach their audiences in new and innovative ways.
An award-winning creative with 20 years of experience in art direction, design and more, Kawamura has worked at top creative agencies such as Crispin Porter Bogusky, The Community, AlmapBBDO, Africa, DM9DDB and Leo Burnett. His creative portfolio spans global consumer brands, such as Volkswagen, Infiniti, Verizon, Pepsi, AB Inbev, Marriott Hotels, Visa, Havaianas, Pedigree, Letgo and Fifa, among others.
Laura Mizrahi
Laura Mizrahi
Laura began her career in consumer advertising, working on everything from airlines to dish soap to diapers. She was first introduced to healthcare advertising at Grey, NY, and never looked back. During her 13 years at Grey, she successfully launched brands in Immunology, Diabetes and Oncology, among others. Laura is perhaps best known for her work on Cialis, which helped catapult a third-to-market product to #1. In her spare time, Laura exercises her right brain (while writing with her left hand) as an author of stories, screenplays and essays. She lives in Manhattan with her two daughters and a naughty cat named Alfalfa.
Felipe Munhoz
Felipe Munhoz
EVP, Group Creative Director
CDM New York
Felipe is a passionate EVP, Group Creative Director, with over 16 years of experience. He has developed campaigns for the most important clients in the world and being recognized with most of the awards, including Manny’s, Clio Health, Cannes, D&AD and One Show. In 2019 he was ranked by Luerzer’s Archive Magazine #1 Art Director in US.
With an under-graduation on Advertising and graduation on Strategic Design, he joined CDM in 2020, and since then he’s been responsible for raising the bar of the agency’s creative work, developing campaigns that combine a unique strategic approach with a stunning art direction.
Prior experience includes leading one of the creative teams in TBWA Brazil to get Kimberly Clark’s first Gold Lion in Cannes and creative director at Area 23, collecting dozens of awards. Through all his career, he had clients such Lilly, Bayer and GSK, combining experience in consumer, pharma and different medias (film, print, digital and activations).
Felipe is also passionate about photography. But over the last 3 years he has shooting the same thing over and over again: his 10-months old baby girl and 3-years-old boy.
Susan Perlbachs
Susan Perlbachs
Chief Creative Officer
Award-winning executive Susan Perlbachs is chief creative officer (CCO) at Intouch Group. As CCO, Perlbachs is responsible for creative leadership across all Intouch Group affiliates, locations and clients. Announced as CCO of the privately held full-service agency network on Aug. 6, 2020, Perlbachs is based in Intouch’s New York office.
Perlbachs arrived at Intouch with nearly 20 years of experience with other renowned healthcare agencies, including high-level positions at GSW and Grey Healthcare, driving major campaigns for U.S. and global brands for professional and consumer audiences, including over-the-counter, oncology, nephrology and neurology. Most recently before joining Intouch, she served as EVP, Group Creative Director at FCB Health. Honors and accolades include being named one of PharmaVoice’s Top 100 Most Inspiring People, speaking at Cannes Lions Health and serving as a Clio judge. She also was named an HBA Rising Star.
Gary Scheiner
Gary Scheiner
Executive Vice President, Executive Creative Director
Gary Scheiner has had a pretty fulfilling career so far. His first commercial ran during the Super Bowl. He launched several new car brands for GM, a wine brand for Kraft, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation hand-in-hand with Michael J. Fox. He’s worked with A-list celebrities, Grammy-winning musicians and Academy Award-winning directors. He even recorded a Beatles song in Abbey Road Studios, using the same Hammond B3 organ that Paul McCartney played on the original track. (That was cool!) But of all the amazing things he’s been a part of, he’s most excited about where he is right now – in healthcare, with all its innovation and game-changing, life-changing products and services.
For the better part of the past 30 years, Gary has had one foot in healthcare marketing and one foot in general advertising, and that dual perspective has kept his work fresh and unexpected. The proof is in the results. He built 3 successful consumer healthcare practices at 3 different non-healthcare agencies. His campaigns for Schering-Plough and Allergan both became cultural icons that lit up social media and late-night talk shows. In fact, Adweek listed his Viberzi campaign #26 on the top 50 most talked about campaigns of 2016. (It was the only healthcare campaign on the list.)
Gary’s work has been honored with hundreds of creative and effectiveness awards – everything from Cannes Lions to Clios, Kellys, ADDYs, Globals, MM&Ms, Manny’s, Globals, NY Festival (Best of Show), DMA ECHO Awards (Best of Show – twice), Webbys, OMMAs, and more. He regularly sits on many of the above award show juries. In 2018, Gary was inducted into the DTC Perspectives Hall of Fame for a career of creating differentiating, motivating consumer healthcare marketing.
Today, Gary calls CDM Princeton home, where as EVP, Executive Creative Director, he oversees the creative direction for the agency’s impressive portfolio of lifechanging brands. And he couldn’t be more excited.
James Talerico
James Talerico
President & Executive Creative Director
Heartbeat
Growing up near Scranton Pennsylvania, James spent a childhood in his grandfather’s bar, serving pony bottles of Rolling Rock to retired coal miners while memorizing verb declensions for the next day’s Latin class. He’s been seeking out and creating such strange juxtapositions ever since.
As President & Executive Creative Director for Heartbeat – the Agency for Healthcare Challenger Brands – James has launched ambitious creative campaigns, unafraid of emotion, rich in craft and tailored to inspire action, for clients such as Genentech and Pfizer, Applied Therapeutics and Agile Therapeutics. With his clients, his teams have hoisted more than 200 creative advertising awards during the last ten years, from Pencils to MANNYs, Webbies to EMMYs.
James started his career in advertising as a founding partner and creative leader of thoughtbubble productions in 1997, a creative agency on the front lines of the digital revolution. Thoughtbubble’s ground-breaking initiatives were featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Ad Age and AdWeek as harbingers of the next generation of advertising content.
His subsequent path to healthcare carved through sectors as diverse as publishing and CPG, QSR and professional sports. Along the way James picked up a healthy skepticism of the latest thing and a deep commitment to advancing good health through creative wonder and hard work.
Sometimes found sitting on a piece of fiberglass off the coast of New Jersey, James is madly in love with two glorious women: his wife, Shawn, and daughter, Hallelujah. His favorite color is white.
About the 2021 Manny Awards and MedAdvocate Jury Members
Med Ad News honors the best in healthcare communications at the 32nd Annual Manny Awards, to be held virtually on April 22nd, 2021.
For more than thirty years, the Manny Awards have paid tribute to the creative work of agencies serving the healthcare market, their people and their contributions to the industry. Each year at this gala awards ceremony, Med Ad News and agency professionals come together to acknowledge those making significant contributions to, and celebrate creative excellence in, healthcare communications. On this special evening, more than 1,000 industry peers will join Med Ad News in honoring winners in a range of award categories.
Launched as part of the 2016 Med Ad News Manny Awards, a second level of voting is conducted by a carefully vetted jury of industry experts. Finalists in each category, determined by the initial online voting process, will be reviewed in detail by the judging panel. The “MedAdvocate” panel consists of unbiased representatives who analyze the outstanding components of each finalist creative award campaign as part of an inspiring dialogue.
This process is repeated for each category finalist for every creative category. Following the panel’s discussion, the Manny Awards MedAdvocate Jury is asked to cast their blind ballots to determine the winning campaigns.
Register for the virtual 32nd Annual Manny Awards on Thursday, April 22nd, 2021.
