AbelsonTaylor Group today announced the formal debut of AT Activate, a full-service media shop. The agency launches with 20 full-timers and budding relationships with a range of AbelsonTaylor clients.

While AbelsonTaylor has done more than its share of media work over the course of its 43 years, the evolving digital landscape prompted the company to upgrade and formalize its offering.

“In the old days, media for an HCP-only agency, which is what we were, was just the typical journals,” said AT Group president Jeff Berg. “Things have gotten more sophisticated… With the digital revolution, we realized there was more we could be doing.”

Activate will be led by VP, media strategy Christie Volke, who joined AT in October 2021 after stints at Klick Health and Havas Media Group. A 2023 MM+M Women to Watch honoree, Volke has been charged with leading a 20-strong team of specialists with a diverse set of media experiences.

“We have people with clinical backgrounds who are trained in nursing. We have people from entertainment,” she noted. “This might be their first pharma job and they’re bringing that big outside thinking.”

The decision to bolster AT’s media offering and brand it as Activate was something of a no-brainer. The agency had long teamed with other media shops on an as-needed basis — but while those partnerships were largely fruitful, they added additional administrative complications.

“Clients would be using a different partner for media — it was disjointed,” explained EVP, director of client services Lynnette Hunter. “We saw an opportunity to solve a problem for them [by doing] strategy all the way through to execution and measurement.”

Berg agreed, adding, “We looked at the opportunity and said, ‘What are we waiting for?’ We partner incredibly well with other agencies doing different things we aren’t doing, but this was an opportunity to bring [media] to the forefront.”

Activate arrives at a moment when a robust health-media capability is on the verge of becoming a must-have for agencies of even modest scale. As Hunter noted, clients under pressures of their own – budgetary, administrative and more – crave a more streamlined relationship with their agency partners. A dedicated media offering signals that a firm’s promises about being a one-stop shop are more than just facile self-branding.

“You gotta have this right now,” Berg stressed. “It makes things so much easier for clients and for our account folks to not have that third party [media partner], which adds another layer.”

Activate’s principal services and platforms at launch include Media Mix Modeling (which, per AT, “determines and optimal allocation of promotional investment across channels”), a Multi-Touch Attribution Model (which “quantifies how much each touchpoint along the marketing journey contributes to conversion”) and a Reporting Suite (featuring “user-friendly dashboards to monitor campaign performance”).

Clients and AT staffers have responded positively to what they’ve heard about Activate so far, Volke reported.

“The early challenges are always around adoption. When you’re doing something new, you need buy-in from all teams,” she said. “We needed to do a lot of education and nurturing internally and with clients. Once we established what the plan was, the challenges were minimal… The organization has been super-supportive.”

Per the 2024 MM+M Agency 100, AbelsonTaylor Group saw revenue jump 17%, to $70.2 million, in 2023. Client mainstays include Astellas Pharma, Takeda, CSL Behring and Radius Health.