Med Ad News Agency Issue Features Elevate Healthcare

Creating Innovation in the Agency Business

Elevating healthcare marketing is an ambitious mission, but former agency presidents and now agency founders Frank X. Powers and Lorna Weir say they are up for the challenge, dedicating their energies and futures to creating a healthcare marketing organization that elevates the brand value, sales performance, and reputation of their clients. According to Powers and Weir, they have created a company structure that meets the need for a new way of working with clients.

“At this stage in the healthcare industry’s evolution, clients need a different, more innovative way of working with strategic and marketing partners,” agency leaders say. “Brand value must now be defined to address increasing pressure around cost, the interests and needs of multiple stakeholders, and a myriad of new technologies and expectations. All this and more must be done with less. Therefore, brands today require a partner with a specific set of skills: category expertise, multidisciplinary talent, complete commitment, and a willingness to offer scalability and flexibility as they navigate the path to being competitive.”

According to its executives, the unique structure of Elevate allows it to be what clients need in their development paths – strategic practice, think tank, idea incubator, marketing agency, and creative arsenal.

Early on, agency leaders say, Elevate recognized that identifying the best solutions for its clients could be achieved more efficiently and successfully with a leaner, more experienced senior team of strategists who bring immediate value in a highly focused manner.

“This requires top people from multiple disciplines all working together to provide a comprehensive view of the complexities of a dynamic healthcare landscape to more quickly identify business and brand opportunities that can have a significant impact on a client’s business, then translate, transform, and elevate the promise of those opportunities into real-world success,” management says. “This is particularly true for challenger brands, an area of expertise for Elevate.”

The company founders say they believe in this mission and model so much they named their agency after it. “When we began planning our model, our mission and vision made it very clear that there was no other choice but to name our new venture ‘Elevate,’ clearly communicating the benefit we offer to clients,” Powers says.

The Year’s Accomplishments

Creating innovation in the agency business  by changing the agency business model may be the first and biggest accomplishment of the year for Elevate, according to management. In its first official year of existence, Elevate was named one of the most innovative start-ups in healthcare, as well as already achieving the status of being one of the top 100 agencies, executives say.
Employing this new model has helped Elevate achieve rapid ascension, landing major creative assignments and agency-of-record business from the leadership of several national and international healthcare companies, executives say, and putting the Elevate model into action has resulted in a wide range of assignments for this growing firm.

Read the entire Elevate Healthcare profile in the April 2017 edition of Med Ad News.