TBWA\WorldHealth: 2021

TBWA\WorldHealth

220 East 42nd Street, 14th Floor

New York, NY 10017

Telephone 

212-771-3000

Website 

tbwaworldhealth.com

 

SERVICES MIX

Professional promotion (physicians) 55%

Professional promotion (nurses, other HCPs 25%

Patient marketing 10%

Business to business 5%

Other (internalcommunications) 5%

 

CLIENT ROSTER

Aimmune Global

Amgen 

AstraZeneca

Austedo International Markets

Bayer

Biogen

Bluebird Bio

BMS

GE Healthcare

Gilead Sciences

Horizon Pharma

Idorsia 

Intra-Cellular Therapies

J&J Apple Heartline

Johnson & Johnson

Merck & Co.

Merck/AstraZeneca

MSD

Novartis

Pfizer 

Roche

Sarepta Therapeutics

Shire

Special Olympics (pro bono)

Takeda Pharmaceutical 

TEDMED (pro bono)

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries

Xeris Pharmaceuticals

 

Agency leadership calls TBWA\WorldHealth “a radically open creative collective” with 14 offices around the world. “Since its launch in 2016, the agency has been a disruptive force in the industry, partnering with the world’s most ambitious healthcare brands and guided by three core values: #BeAuthentic, #DoGood, and #RaiseHell,” management says.

“This past year has truly shown what this agency is made of,” says CEO Robin Shapiro. “As a collective, our commitment to brave and disruptive work, to our clients, and to each other was put to the test, and we succeeded in every way.”

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The Disruption^® Company” turned the challenges of 2020 into opportunities, according to agency leaders, who say rapid evolutions in work culture, shifting client priorities, and a renewed global interest in advanced healthcare technologies gave the agency the chance to rethink its organizational structure and creative offerings in new, more innovative ways. As a result, the agency saw 16 percent overall growth, adding major brands to its portfolio from clients such as Biogen, Idorsia, Moderna, Pfizer, Sobi, and Teva, and welcoming more than 150 top-tier employees to the team. Among many exciting new business wins was Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, positioning the agency as an industry leader in the fight against the ongoing global health crisis. Client health also remained a high priority, and the agency achieved 95 percent client retention, consistent with historical performance. 

Supercharging diversity, equity, and inclusion was the agency’s stated goal coming into 2020, and it delivered in powerful ways, management says. The agency’s employee group DIVERS\TEAM rolled out new initiatives aimed at boosting DE&I within the agency, including the Lifted Learnership Program, a community of continuous learning and mentorship, and, in partnership with Omnicom Health Group, Brave Spaces, an ongoing series of important discussions, including but not limited to racial and social justice topics. The agency also rolled out the Change Ambassadors group in which leaders within TBWA\WorldHealth were tapped to be accountable for DE&I goals as part of a broader five-year strategic plan.

#BlackHealthNow, which began in February 2020 as a video series interviewing Black employees about their experiences with medical bias, evolved into a highly visible social media campaign with livestreamed discussions featuring medical leaders, politicians, and celebrities sharing their thoughts and health advice for Black Americans. To date, the campaign has garnered 2.1 million Twitter impressions, 35,000-plus Linked­In video views, and 50,000-plus live viewers on Instagram, and has been featured in major publications such as AdWeek and Adobe Blog. 

The agency also went after new ways to partner with brave clients and lead them toward truly inclusive creative campaigns, according to the leadership team. For Bluebird Bio, a biotech company offering a trailblazing sickle cell disease therapy, TBWA\WorldHealth created Spark, a patient outreach campaign aimed at amplifying and understanding the needs of an underserved patient population to ensure that the brand’s voice is as inclusive and authentic as possible. Not only has this effort helped the agency meet its own goals for boosting DE&I in their creative work, it has also helped TBWA\WorldHealth elevate the broader industry standard.

In March 2020, CEO Sharon Callahan announced that she would be transitioning to a new position as CEO of sister agency CDM while remaining close to TBWA\WorldHealth as chairwoman. Former Global President Robin Shapiro was then named CEO of TBWA\WorldHealth. To meet growing business needs and adapt to the evolving priorities of its clients, the agency strengthened its Global Leadership Team with several additional high-profile promotions and new hires. Carlene Esposito was promoted to Associate Managing Partner, TBWA\Health Collective. Andy Hayley was made Global Managing Partner, TBWA\WorldHealth. Kellie Moran became Senior VP, Director of Operations, and Stephanie Schulman was elevated to President of WildType.

New hires at TBWA\WorldHealth included Loretta Berghoff, Human Resources Director; Roshen Matthew, Chief Experience Officer; Linda Poe, Chief Financial Officer; and Mindy Price, Executive Director of Strategy. At TBWA\WorldHealth London, Patrick Deere became Finance Director and Mario Forgione was hired as Associate Managing Partner. Richard Fraser was hired as Managing Partner, TBWA\Health Collective. Additionally, WildType took on Jose Rivera and Lila Shah-Wrights as Associate Managing Partners.

Several members of the TBWA\WorldHealth team were recognized with notable awards and honors in 2020, including Shapiro in the PharmaVoice 100; Group Account Director Jessica Echterling, MM&M 40 Under 40; Associate Managing Partner Carlene Esposito, Healthcare Businesswoman’s Association (HBA) Rising Star; and Associate Medical Legal Regulatory Director Ed McLane Hara, Director of Project Management Alex Sinton, and Associate Strategist Ellen Sliva, as Medical Advertising Hall of Fame (MAHF) Future Famers. 

STRUCTURE AND SERVICES

The transition to a fully remote work environment early in 2020 was remarkably seamless for TBWA\WorldHealth, agency leadership says. “The agency had already begun moving toward a geographically boundless way of working in prior years, and agile workspaces and work/life balance initiatives had given teams the skills to work collaboratively from offices and homes around the globe,” management says. “In almost no time, the company was pitching and winning new business, launching fresh campaigns, and laying out innovative plans for the future.”

Existing offerings and initiatives were founded in the core belief of people>places helped the agency rise to the circumstances of the year. For example, TBWA\BALANCE was created as a way to support work/life balance for all employees by providing boundary-setting resources, training for managers, and flexible remote work policies. DIVERS\TEAM was created by two junior employees in 2018 with the goal of building an agency that is authentically diverse, strategically equitable, and intentionally inclusive of all voices. Career Launcher is a development incubator for new talent that propels employees through important milestones, drastically reducing turnover at the junior level.

With these support systems firmly in place, the agency launched RE\WORK, which the leadership team says is aimed at helping employees not only adapt to but embrace a rapidly changing work culture. The task force led a massive employee outreach effort to better understand attitudes toward remote work, and they are now using that data to reshape company priorities and practices for the pandemic era and beyond.

TBWA\WorldHealth has core offices in New York, Jersey City, Boston, Chicago, Irvine, San Francisco, London, Mexico City, Paris, Singapore, Istanbul, and Zurich. It is part of Omnicom Health Group, the largest healthcare advertising network in the world. 

The agency has four business units: TBWA\WorldHealth, focused on U.S. and global HCP communications; TBWA\WorldHealth London, specializing in global HCP communications; WildType, a bespoke agency for Merck’s Keytruda; and The TBWA\Health Collective, which provides consumer health and wellness communications. 

FUTURE PLANS

In the early months of 2021, everyone seems to be asking when things will finally return to normal,” agency leaders say. “TBWA\WorldHealth is asking, why not think bigger? Why seek the normal when so much of the abnormal has worked so well?”

The leadership team says they have done thorough visioning around the future of work in a post-COVID world. “They have learned that while being fully remote can offer geographically boundless advantages, there are some things that remain unaccounted for: things like the peripheral vision of being in an office, spontaneous learning, ad-hoc culture building, and more personal coaching and performance management,” agency executives say.

In March 2021, Shapiro participated in a Filament webinar on the future of work. “Not everything translates perfectly to the virtual setting,” she acknowledges. “So we as an agency are committed to finding just the right synthesis and sharing it out with the industry at large, with more flexibility, more locations, and more fluidity, and in a way such that the office takes on the new purpose of bringing people together for learning, collaboration, and culture-building.”

The agency is focused on continuing to evolve with clients – doubling down on data, performance marketing, digital, and agile solutions. While the past year has certainly given new meaning to the proverbial “best laid plans”, TBWA\WorldHealth has nothing but optimism for the future and looks forward to a disruptive 2021, agency leaders say.

PHILANTHROPY/CITIZENSHIP

Despite office closures and stay-at-home orders, the TBWA\WorldHealth team found more ways than ever to activate around their #DoGood value in 2020. 

The agency followed through on its commitment to several charity efforts in 2020, with continued support for organizations such as The American Lung Association and The American Heart Association. Employees crowdsourced recipes to create and sell a digital cookbook, the proceeds of which were donated to Feeding America. And the agency put money that would normally be spent on weekly employee treats to good use by sending meals to frontline workers. The company also grants each employee a yearly charity day, which translates to about 2,500 hours of company-supported community service each year. 

TBWA\WorldHealth continued its pro-bono support of organizations such as MAHF, for which Shapiro was elected co-chair. And at the beginning of 2020, the agency worked closely with long-time pro-bono partner TEDMED to develop a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind augmented reality host for the 2020 TEDMED conference.

To combat a rise in health issues going unnoticed or unaddressed due to pandemic-era lockdowns, employees on the TBWA\WorldHealth London team came forward with an idea called #SelfieHealth, which can now be found online at selfiehealth.care. The campaign asks people to perform a “selfie hug” and share it on social media, driving people to the website for information about the importance of performing self-health checks during isolation. 

In summer 2020, as the eyes of the world turned to the racial injustices that are endemic in the U.S., TBWA\WorldHealth stood with the Black Lives Matter movement, amplifying calls for justice through social media channels, sponsoring discussions about inequality, and doubling down on its support for DIVERS\TEAM. TBWA\WorldHealth added Juneteenth as a yearly company holiday and held a highly successful internal donation drive where funds were matched for organizations like NAACP, The Equal Justice Initiative, and Black Lives Matter.