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Balancing the status quo with a taste for the new reaps benefits
Harrison and Star may have marked a victory of sorts for the status quo during Mardene Miller's first full year overseeing day-to-day operations at the agency-but that doesn't mean that there aren't changes afoot.
Named president of the Omnicom shop in May 2012 after a stint as one of three SVP/managing directors, Miller replaced Ty Curran in the role. He remains CEO of Medical Specialist Communications Group, which comprises H&S and sibling Biolumina.
Tops on her to-do list, Miller told MM&M at the time of the transition, was not to fix what wasn't broken. And that's how she's approached things. "Our model focused on the specialist has proven to be very successful for us, and we've continued on that path," she says.
As everyone knows, that model was set in motion decades ago by agency founder Larry Star, who "had wonderful foresight in creating our mission and position to be the specialist agency, and that has continued to lead to unprecedented growth for us," says Miller.
While most of its promotional work is still oriented toward HCPs, the agency now handles a fair amount of direct-to-patient-which is distinct from DTC in that the target audience is people currently on treatment, vs. consumers who don't even know they have the condition. The DTP business can entail working on adherence or other strategies, like getting them to stay on treatment or switch to another.
Probably its largest-scale DTP effort involves helping long-time client Teva Neuroscience roll out a 40mg, three-time-a-week version of injectable MS drug Copaxone to doctors and patients. Miller considers this H&S's greatest achievement last year. "That was a very good match for us," she says of the work marching the conventional patients over from the daily to the threes-time-per-week version. "When looking at the population of patients on Copaxone, probably the lion's share have converted over to the new formulation."
Teva's patient outreach system and conversion efforts have drawn praise from...