Publicis Health announced Thursday morning the debut of Insagic, a distinct insights and advisory business unit designed to help pharma companies and other health-adjacent organizations thrive in the current data-and-analytics era.

Insagic is structured to address one of the industry’s increasingly vexing headaches: an overabundance of data. More data has been created in the last two years than in the entirety of human history that preceded them, noted Publicis Health chief patient officer Susan Manber.

“Nobody’s lacking data. The problem is insights, and the confidence to act on them and drive them forward,” she explained. “We’re flipping the foundation with this launch and we’re putting real world data at the core of all of our agencies. When we have truly disparate strategic minds attacking a problem from different angles, we’re going to get a better result.”

To that point, when Publicis Health chief commercial officer Larry Mickelberg returned to the Publicis fold in January 2022, he was charged with better aligning the organization’s data and insights capabilities. “There were a lot of disparate parts in that practice over the years that we decided to pull together,” he said.

Insagic, which pairs linguists and data scientists with UX and behavioral experts, represents the culmination of those efforts. The unit is engineered to handle everything from audience segmentation to persuasion modeling to intervention design.

Its central offering, the Insagic platform, meshes “billions of clinical and lifestyle data points” with information from Publicis sibling Epsilon’s consumer database and from Verilogue’s 1.6 million minutes of actual physician/patient dialogues, according to a company statement.

Manber said that Publicis Health has invested three years and considerable resources in building the Insagic platform. She believes it represents a philosophical shift of sorts, one that necessarily brings down all silos in its path.

“It’s a notion that marketing is a social science with the same kinds of rigor and discipline that scientists have,” she explained. “Think of it like this: immuno-oncology would not exist if the immunologists and the oncologists didn’t start talking to each other. We’re saying the same thing. Our data scientists are amazing, but they could go down a rabbit hole if they’re not partnering with the brand strategist and the folks who are on the frontlines actually working with the client.”

Mickelberg agreed, adding, “This whole initiative is by marketers for marketers. We’re not talking to scientists, wonks or technology leaders; we’re talking to the chief patient officer and the chief commercial officer. I think that is really different from other offerings in the market.”

Insagic launches with around 50 people under its roof and an almost single-minded focus on creating better outcomes.

“Outcomes are the coin of the realm,” Manber said. “This business is the first of several initiatives that recognize that, so we thought it deserved the importance of being its own business unit.”