The Medical Advertising Hall of Fame will induct Medscape founder Peter Frishauf, advertising metrics pioneer David Labson and Dorothy Philips, Ph.D., who blazed a trail for women in medical advertising as president and CEO of Barnum Communications.
Frishauf co-founded F&F Publications at age 26, then went on to launch SCP Communications before starting Medscape in 1995, when the notion of a website where physicians could find peer-reviewed medical content and CME was a visionary one.
Labson worked in market research at Geigy and Pfizer before founding Health Industries Research, where he developed tools to measure qualitative aspects of media as well as readership and ad exposure. He was the first researcher to make data directly available to ad agencies, which led to industry-wide adoption of sophisticated media tools.
Philips started out teaching advertising and marketing as an assistant professor and, while writing a PhD dissertation on pharma marketing, met James Barnum, MD, founder of the Deltakos division of J. Walter Thompson. She soon followed Barnum to his new agency, Barnum Communications, as president and CEO, becoming the first woman to hold such a position at a major ad agency. There, and later at her own communications agency, she pioneered vaccine advertising and promotion in her handling of SmithKline Beecham’s vaccine business.
The inductees will be honored at a black-tie dinner on Feb. 5 in New York.
