While CDMP’s annual all-hands meeting is usually agency president Craig Romanok’s favorite day of the year, its most recent one, in March, sent him swooning.
“It’s when we celebrate each other and set the path for the year ahead,” he explains. “But since it was in person this year, everyone wanted to come. We flew people in and found a hotel that could socially distance us.”
Featuring a real live happy hour and a photo booth, the event was a full-on homecoming. “We saw people we hadn’t seen in two years, and the level of chatter was amazing,” Romanok adds.
The event capped a year that Romanok views as a considerable success, despite revenue that remained flat at $30 million. It included consolidating gains from the prior year, he notes, when revenue surged 36%.
The agency, née CDM Princeton, formally rebranded as CDMP a little over a year ago. Romanok says that everything that has transpired since then confirms in his mind that the company made the right decision: The pandemic hammered home that this agency is more a state of mind than, well, the state of New Jersey. To wit, its 65 employees work in 14 states, from Vermont to Florida to Montana.
As for the “life-changing agency” branding that came along with the new moniker, Romanok believes it has helped sharpen the company’s collective focus.
“It gave us more energy and pizzazz. We’ve got a different vibe and culture — not just from our other Omnicom counterparts, but other agencies in the industry,” he says.
That includes a solid niche in the world of emerging biotech. More and more often, these smaller companies have been calling on CDMP to help create a clinical or operational infrastructure.
“It’s high-touch, very focused on connecting with them throughout the entire journey,” Romanok says. “We find that these types of clients want an agency to be an extension of their team.”
He points to wins this year from longtime client BioMarin as a case in point. Its first assignment was on the first gene therapy for hemophilia — the kind of work that is “genuinely life-changing for that community,” Romanok says. In 2021, CDMP added work on BioMarin’s treatment for phenylketonuria and an additional gene therapy in the company pipeline.
“There is no playbook, and that means it’s all about knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do,” Romanok says.
Being part of the Omnicom network remains helpful, of course, and CDMP has found itself calling on Maslansky & Partners, a language agency, with increasing frequency. “Its whole focus is finding the right narrative and lexicon,” he notes. “Language matters so much.”
While CDMP has four core values, the importance of grace continues to grow as people adjust to new ways of working.
“Put bluntly, that means we don’t hire assholes,” Romanok says. “We pick each other up when they’re down and rally around each other — and that’s what clients need. We’re the people who say to clients, ‘We may not have the answer yet, but we’ll figure it out.’”
. . .
Work from outside pharma you admire…
I love The Homeless Bank Account because it’s built on real insight and it made a real difference. Over 280,000 homeless people in the U.K. are without a fixed address, so they can’t open a bank account. So HSBC partnered with a local charity and used the charity’s address as proof of identity. Now homeless people had a home for their money — and a connection back to society. Genius! — Gary Scheiner, EVP, executive creative director
From the June 01, 2022 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
