Former Abbott Nutrition communications director Steve Yuan has joined Edelman’s Chicago health practice as EVP of integrated analytics and innovation.
Yuan started at Edelman last month, reporting to Kevin Coleman, GM of health for the office. He is responsible for building and integrating the Chicago health practice’s analytics capability, including commercializing new analytics products, services, and offerings. Yuan is working with Edelman’s consumer health, pharma, diagnostics and devices, and associations and organizations clients.
“[We’re building] the ability to integrate horizontally to follow a consumer from search to how they talk about you on social to the type of content they’re viewing to the type of advertisements they are seeing,” Yuan said. “There is value in providing a seamless experience for clients.”
Yuan is working to build offerings to help health clients manage data among their comms, advertising, and marketing agencies. He said the goal is to bring together the efforts and be able to follow a customer or patient from the beginning of their interaction with a company to the end.
His work is focused on health clients because the sector has “the biggest need,” but he hopes the strategy can be eventually implemented across other sectors, as well.
“It’s also a category transforming,” Yuan said. “Health to me is one of those cases where you have to balance rational and emotional. It’s a challenging category where you’re dealing with life and death, quality of life and survival. Health is one of the most interesting categories, if not the most challenging.”
Yuan was previously global director of communications planning for Abbott Nutrition. Earlier in his career, he was SVP and global planning director for the Samsung account at Leo Burnett, VP of strategic planning at GSW Worldwide, SVP of brand strategy and research at Cleveland-based agency Wyse Advertising, and market research manager at Henry Ford Health System in Ohio.
