Elevate Healthcare Marketing

Elevate Named as a Top Innovative Startup

Elevate Named as a Top Innovative Startup

PM360 Recognizes Elevate Healthcare for Disrupting the Status Quo of the Agency Model

Blue Bell, PA December 19, 2016

Creating innovation in the agency business… by changing the agency business model

Innovation inspired by the peer-to-peer revolution

There has been a peer-to-peer revolution in marketing. The simple idea behind companies like Airbnb, Uber, and many other new businesses is to put people together directly without a middleman. This new model of business relationships has become possible because the way we interface with each other digitally is changing the way we connect, communicate, and conduct commerce.

What if you were able to take one of the key principles of the peer–to-peer commerce model—a streamlined yet robust interface between individuals to accomplish mutual business goals—and apply it to an agency model?

Elevate Founders Lorna Weir & Frank X. Powers

Elevate Founders Lorna Weir & Frank X. Powers

Elevate Healthcare Marketing is doing just that. Founded by two former top agency presidents, Lorna Weir and Frank X. Powers, Elevate is an innovative startup, staffed by a group of successful and experienced ad agency executives, that eschews traditional agency models, traditions, and formulas for a focus on providing strategic counsel through peer-to-peer interaction between clients and a team of multidisciplinary, deeply experienced, and visionary senior talent.

Innovative structure and vision

Structuring its model in a new way creates two immediate benefits for Elevate and its clients. “Both parties in the engagement are liberated from the need for multiple layers of varying experience levels, time-consuming onboarding processes, and steep learning curves. And perhaps more important, we can provide a deeper level of interaction and a higher degree of agility, focusing completely on the challenge at hand,” says Powers. “We dig in quicker, respond to a client’s marketing or strategic challenge more thoroughly, and pivot to provide potential solutions faster.”

Elevate is a startup, but one with a head start. While just barely a year old, Elevate is comprised of a key leadership group that’s been working together for decades—which is part of what makes the peer model work so well. They already have a following of commercial and marketing leadership in specialized pharma and medical device companies lined up, engaging in this new liberated way of working together.

Why now? Why change the model?

The answer is in the new model that was created in response to the dynamic environment in healthcare marketing. But secondarily, it’s time for this model because it’s needed. At this stage in the healthcare industry’s evolution, the most enterprising clients need a different, more innovative way of working with strategic and marketing partners. Elevate’s structure allows it to be what clients need when they need it: part strategic practice, part think tank, part idea incubator, part marketing agency. Early on, Elevate recognized that identifying the best solutions to a commercial marketing need or product objective for its clients would mean building a leaner, more experienced senior team of strategists who bring immediate value to a challenge in a highly focused manner. This requires a multidisciplinary approach—with top senior representation from commercial, marketing/sales, science, and creative—allowing Elevate to provide a comprehensive view of the complexities of a particular healthcare landscape, helping to more quickly identify challenges that have had a significant impact on a clients’ business—then translate and transform the promise of those business opportunities into real-world solutions.

The challenge of scaling up. And down

To be as scalable as clients need, and to provide the most value, the model is not solely driven by traditional management hierarchy that is constantly seeking to scale up engagements to meet internal growth goals. Elevate’s new peer-to-peer “operating system” increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility. Perhaps most important, it allows for Elevate to reorganize itself as client needs demand. Powers explains: “Scaling up is sometimes necessary depending on a company’s or a brands’ lifecycle, but just as often we are adept at keeping the scale in line with what our clients need at any given time.”

Flexibility and freedom

In most agencies or marketing companies all people have exactly one job description. That description is often imprecise, outdated, and irrelevant to their day-to-day work or their higher purpose for a client. At Elevate, senior people have flexible, even multiple, roles, often on different teams, allowing people a lot more freedom to utilize and maximize talents, and clients can take advantage of those skills in a way they couldn’t before in a traditional agency structure.

In this way, Elevate is aiming to disrupt the status quo of the agency business model in the name of improving the state of healthcare marketing—changing the definition of what a specialized agency is supposed to be, how it is supposed to operate, and what success looks like.

As featured in the December 2016 PM360 Innovation Issue