Abelson-Taylor

Medical Marketing and Media, Jul 2005 by Dobrow, Larry

An exciting year of new accounts, new capabilities and new alliances

Though Abelson-Taylor snared 14 new brands in 2004 and eight more in the first five months of this year, agency president Dale Taylor seems equally eager to discuss one of his company's first ventures into a new arena: direct-to-consumer advertising. The firm had done professional advertising work for Ramelteon, an insomnia treatment from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, for about a year and was invited (along with Chicago-based marketing firm Cramer-Krasselt) to pitch for the DTC component. Abelson-Taylor got the work.

"We got into it at a strange time, now that the future of DTC is so up in the air," Taylor says. "But our philosophy has always been that we'll try new things when it makes sense, or when our clients ask us to." While Abelson-Taylor's focus remains firmly on the professional side of healthcare advertising, the addition of a DTC assignment has had a side benefit: "It was something a lot of people on our staff were anxious to do. They were looking at DTC advertising and saying, 'We can do better than that.'"

The independently owned Abelson-Taylor chose to appease its staff in an entirely different way as well: a substantial part of the agency was sold to 11 employees. "It guaranteed management continuity at a time when maybe you're not seeing a lot of that in the business," Taylor says. "I think it also showed that there are equity opportunities down the road for people here."

And then there was an evolution in the company's relationship with global marketing behemoth Omnicom Group. In February, the firm expanded its international reach by partnering with Omnicom's Diversified Agency Services Healthcare arm; the companies will work together on an as-needed basis.

All this, of course, isn't to downplay Abelson-Taylor's new business efforts over the last 18 months - though Taylor himself does: "We're on a pretty good run right now, but those come and go." The agency was tapped to launch Gilead Sciences' Truvada HIV-AIDS therapy as well as Scios' Natrecor cardiovascular drug, and it forged a relationship with Connectics for Evoclin and a second dermatology brand. The agency also took on additional work from longtime client MGI Pharma (for Dacogen, a cancer therapy).

The current year has shaped up similarly well. Abelson-Taylor recently netted an anti-platelet agent from Eli Lilly, a new attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder therapy from Shire Pharmaceuticals and fast-growing anti-hypertensive Benicar, jointly produced by Sankyo and Forest Pharmaceuticals.

The firm, however, did lose a pair of big-name brands. When Aventis was united with Sanofi-Synthelabo, the newly merged company assigned the Allegra account-which Abelson-Taylor had held for eight years - elsewhere. "You hate to be on the wrong side of one of those corporate decisions, but it's part of the business," Taylor notes. Similarly, the company lost TAP Pharmaceutical Products' Prevacid after handling the brand since before its launch in 1994. That loss, however, was rendered considerably less painful when Eli Lilly hired the agency to work on Cialis shortly thereafter.

As a result of the new business, Abelson-Taylor finds itself up about 25 staffers in recent months, leaving it somewhere in the neighborhood of 260. "The last time we laid someone off was in 1988," Taylor claims. Asked the inevitable question about the possibility of a sale to a larger marketing company, Taylor states flatly that the firm is happy where it is.

"One of the big values of independence is that you don't have to make a quarterly payment to somebody in London or New York or Paris," he explains. "You can keep people around through the lows and the highs. I think that helps make our culture what it is."

-Larry Dobrow

LARRY DOBROW

Larry Dobrow writes about a range of marketing, technology, sports and pop-culture topics. A regular contributor to MediaPost and Peppers & Rogers' Inside ltol, he also writes a weekly baseball column for Maxim's Web site, and is the online TV critic for Stuff. His contributions to the Agency Review Top 30 begin on page 37. Dobrow can be contacted at sirlawr@aol.com.