Nearly all of Eversana’s locations around the world went remote during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But two outposts, a distribution center and a pharmacy, remained open, staffed by essential workers.
In a show of company-wide solidarity, employees banded together to create a video supporting their colleagues on the frontlines. Some even started stitching masks.
To hear Eversana Engage GM Seth Gordon tell it, that thoughtfulness is what distinguishes the company from the competition. “We didn’t have to ask people twice,” he recalls. “People want to help; they’ve chosen this career because the work we do matters to them.”
Eversana Engage didn’t formally debut until January 2020. But in its first full year of operation, the firm saw revenue rise to $51 million, an 18% jump over the $43.1 million its predecessor agencies (which included The Access Group and Patient Experience Project) generated in 2019.
Staff size jumped from 170 people at the start of the year to 202 at the end of it, with managing director, creative Taegan Grice ranking among the big-name additions. She previously served as group creative director at Deloitte Digital. Meanwhile, former WCG chief marketing officer Amy Hutnik joined the parent organization to oversee all of its agency, advisory and evidence services, including Eversana Engage.
Not surprisingly, Gordon believes access to the Eversana mothership’s wealth of data and analytics tools has helped drive the agency’s growth. “We can work with those teams to find patients with rare diseases and find physicians who treat them,” he explains. “Working alongside colleagues in management consulting and with those predictive modeling tools can help us provide crystal-clear pharma/economic analysis.”
Beyond its work for client mainstays such as Endo Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Bausch & Lomb and Novo Nordisk, Eversana Engage added assignments from six organizations during 2020: Macrogenics, Horizon Market Access, Urovant, Revance Therapeutics, Apellis Pharmaceuticals and Evoke Pharma.
Gordon is particularly excited about the agency’s imminent push into the worlds of gene and cell therapies. To date, Eversana Engage has worked with clients in the proof-of-concept and pre-clinical stages, helping them establish what their clinical development programs should look like.
“The fact that we’re doing some very early work with gene therapy clients is wonderful,” he says. “These are major decisions that families and caregivers are undergoing, in terms of what this therapy looks like, how it is administered and the impact it can have, often on children’s lives. It’s some of the work I’m most proud of.”
Not surprisingly, Gordon expects that much of Eversana Engage’s growth in the years ahead will come via work created for digital platforms.
“Our digital team is growing significantly, not to mention our omnichannel platform in supporting launches and clients’ messaging through a number of different channels, stakeholders, physicians and patients,” he continues. “That’s an area where our emphasis on data and analytics is really going to pay off.”
. . .
The idea I wish I had…
If we could hit a reset button, in hindsight I wish we could’ve developed something that clearly conveyed what steps needed to be taken with COVID-19. — Seth Gordon
From the June 01, 2021 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
