Five Questions for Jeanne Martel

Question 1:

What is changing in the health care environment and how is that impacting clients?

"We have the change of what's going on in the current macro environment, the current administration, and all that goes with that. At the end of the day, that's creating a lot of uncertainty for our clients and also for us as agency partners. And I don't think any of us really like uncertainty. I certainly don't.

But beyond that, there are real policy changes that can impact our clients. And the reality is we can't control this. And so, what we try to stay focused on are the things that we can change - while also staying informed so that we are able to advise and support our clients in managing whatever those challenges are.

A lot of things haven't changed. There's a lot of change and transformation going on in our industry, but then there are also things that remain the same. I don't know one client that we work with who is not resource-challenged in some way - that has been going on for a long time. So what they really need is a responsive and nimble team. They rely on us to know the strategy and the science in-and-out, and all the nuances that go along with that. And they need us to execute well. They need us to unburden them of some of the operational challenges that they have."

Question 2:

Where is there room for improvement in the end-to-end commercialization platforms, or the big agency networks?

"I think there has been a promise of this in many cases, and clients have not necessarily experienced the benefit of that promise. It's important to understand that you can't just put all these things together and then voila - that will automatically create this integrated approach. It is really important to understand that it doesn't happen by itself. It's an intentional building of a culture of collaboration, of working together and rewarding teams as a whole. Or in my opinion, it doesn't work.

I often hear people also talk about this in the sense of "big versus small", and the large network agencies and the promise that they make versus the nimbleness of a small company. I don't really think it's about size at all. I think it's about structure and function and the culture that you build within the organization and creating opportunities for teams to collaborate.

It's about removing competition from the equation. That's what happens in a lot of companies where you might have different organizations coming together and integrating and they're all being held accountable for their individual P&Ls. And there's competition naturally that's bred in that environment. We really remove all of that. We try to focus on what's actually best for the client.

If a piece of business comes into the organization, we don't want people fighting over where that revenue is going to sit. We want people purely focused on ‘Who are the right people? What's the expertise we need? How do we form a team around this client to solve these challenges?’ so that we can do what's best for the client. And where the revenue goes is easy. That's not an issue. We really need to be focused on 'How are we lifting the burden for the client? How are we helping them solve this?' and breaking down those silos by not creating them in the first place."

Question 3:

How does your new brand fit into this?

"Loved the name immediately because it so simply reflects what we want to communicate. And I think people just get it immediately. It's simple, it's direct, and it reflects our mission around collaboration. Our belief is that delivery value is about integrating the right minds, tools and strategies so that we can bring those to clients and that our structure breeds performance. Intentionality about building that structure creates a seamless cross-functional experience for the clients as well.

What we really focused on is aligning into four distinct service areas. For us that's medical communications and advertising, learning solutions, strategic consulting, and technology. And then in addition to that we have support from our shared services of creative, meetings and events, and project management.

But I think what really sets us apart is how embedded all of these groups are in each other's teams, and how that reflects on the client - they don't experience the silos that maybe they experience in some other organizations."

Question 4:

How does this impact your planning processes?

"A few years ago after our initial acquisitions, we realized that we had an opportunity to get ahead of this by bringing all these unique and individual experts together to start planning and collaborating. We talked about, new technologies and new opportunities. What can we learn from each other?' And what could we bring that's new and unique to our clients when it comes to brand planning time so that we're not crunched as we usually are in July, August, or God forbid even September, with budgets due in October. We'd sort of lock ourselves in a room and struggle to get the everything done.

Now we bring our teams together early in June and we start. About 75 people in the company get together for a several-day live meeting and we just really kind of do this, this - cross collaboration and sharing of what's out there. So when clients begin that process, our teams are ready. We've already been learning. We've already been ideating about new and innovative ideas to bring to the table. That's one example of how we really try to utilize this very unique and special culture of collaboration that we have, to do our best work for our clients."

Question 5:

How does the core structure of an agency really determine how it functions?

"I won't name clients or anything like that, but I'll describe how this actually looks in real life, as we execute things for clients. One of them was a personal experience that I had. I wasn't intimately involved in the execution of a project, but I showed up on site at a medical conference. We had worked on a number of things for this client and had a cross-collaborative team that we had pulled together from three different teams across the organization. And I got to the conference, and it was the booth, and it was the branding, and it was the MOA video, and it was all the things that we had done to prepare for this presence that we were going to have at this conference.

I remember talking to the client and, and saying, ‘I'm so proud of how this all came together. How are you feeling about it?’ And he said how pleased he was. And I just sort of mentioned flippantly that this was really great to see all these different teams within our organization come together to deliver this.

And he stopped and looked at me and he said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘oh,’ and then I got a little nervous and I was like, ‘Well, we had several teams that came together to, deliver this.’ And it to me, the promise that we make to clients. 

'I didn't even know that' he said, 'So that's amazing because I've worked with a lot of different companies and I've had a lot of different experiences. And so, the fact that that I didn't even know that is pretty amazing.' I walked away from that experience thinking that was a real win - we were able to delight a client in that way and do some great work and utilizing this cross-functional team. And the client didn't even know that we were coming from different parts of the organization.

The other thing that's happening within our organization that tells me that this is working - and that we are unique - is we're starting to get expanded opportunities as an organization. One example of that is an opportunity we had to bring together strategy, creative, and technology to create a bespoke AI chat bot to build solutions directly into a client's portal and/or website.

All in all, I think we could probably agree that stakeholders are really overwhelmed with the volume of digital content that's out there, what they're going to do with it, and how they're going to deliver it. By bringing experts from across our teams together to create more user-centric experiences that are personalized to the individual user’s needs and then customized to the client's data and their environment is something that is really needed. That is not an opportunity that we would have had previously without our ability to express to clients the full spectrum of our expertise. This one happens to be strategy, creative, and technology, but mix it together any way you want.

We can now bring a lot of these things together in a much more powerful offering than I think clients probably would ever have thought possible from us, for many types of projects. But we're very well suited for it today versus where we were five years ago."