Gold
Symbiotix
With a new positioning — “Science that Activates” — this Havas Health & You subsidiary uses scientific rigor to create a compelling new narrative.
The brand repositioning helped trigger a year of substantial growth, with revenue rising 52% in 2021. That follows a 27% gain from the prior year. The agency has roughly doubled its revenue since its acquisition by Havas Health & You in 2015.
New business wins include Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ sleep franchise, Sarepta’s neuromuscular franchise (DMD), AstraZeneca’s virology (RSV), Pfizer’s hematology-oncology and Ionis’ rare neurology and immunology franchises.
Amid that growth, Symbiotix “tripled down” on refining and strengthening its core identity, looking to engage all 132 employees. It instituted twice-weekly agency check-ins and TOASTs — time out for activation sharing together -— to share innovation and showcase client work, bringing together teams from Lexington, Kentucky; New York; and Montreal.
More than a third of the agency works remotely, so it brought them together through socially distanced mini-staff retreats, often celebrating “More Great Days.” That’s become the rallying cry for a resilient mindset and reinforces the agency’s mission.
The agency also found new ways to meet with healthcare providers, pioneering the use of 4K holopresence via a partnership with Portl and AHRT Media. It dug deeper into gamification with LevelEx for P2P gamification. And it established new alliances with Atlas Health for social listening, with real-time maps of both patient and HCP.
Silver
ProHealth
Powered by wins from clients including Biogen (neurology), Teva (respiratory) and UCB (neurology), this IPG-owned agency’s revenue jumped 24% for the year. It stands out from others with its commitment to move from insight to action. Its understanding of the deeper “why” informs content development and tactical ideation. That enables it to move even faster than the healthcare business, which fits its motto: “Get, Things, Done.”
