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Continued success fueled by rapidly growing DTC and interactive practices
AbelsonTaylor president and CEO Dale Taylor seems slyly elated with the fact that his agency's geographic location, hundreds of miles from the advertising epicenter of Madison Avenue, also serves as one of several secret weapons in his agency's formidable arsenal.
"Chicago is not only an attractive place to live and work but once people come here, they tend to stay," Taylor says. "Let's put it this way, we have 53 people on staff with the word director somewhere in their title. In the last six years, only one of them has left the agency. I don't think we would have that same kind of tenure were we in New York, where there are six or more big agencies within 10 miles, all looking for new staff."
AbelsonTaylor currently employs approximately 350 people, all who helped the agency grow its business by a robust 17% in 2007, Taylor says. The outlook is even brighter for 2008, with business up by 21 % as this article went to press.
In 2007, AbelsonTaylor added work for Amgen/ Wyeth's Enbrel; Astellas' Ambisome and Mycamine; Eisai's rufinamide and Zonegran and Vertex's Telapravir. Additionally, the agency won back business for TAP's Prevacid, after a two-year hiatus from working on the brand, along with the Prevacid follow-on compound TAK-390MR. ( AbelsonTaylor handled Prevacid professional work from pre-launch, in 1994, until 2003, producing the iconic "Heals Tough" campaign for the drug. In 2004, TAP switched to GSW Worldwide. AbelsonTaylor regained the account in March 2007.)
The spike in new work called for the addition of 50 new staffers in 2007 and 35, so far, in 2008. A trickle down benefit of added personnel came when the agency relocated to new office digs in the heart of Chicago's Loop last July. "We are now in a space that we designed for ourselves, instead of our previous offices, which we expanded and expanded but which never really had a feeling of community," Taylor explains.
Although logic might dictate that the task of attracting top talent to fill...