Being a leader in radically changing health advertising is not enough for the team at Area 23. What comes next may help redefine how we see health brands, explains the restless Chief Creative Officer Tim Hawkey.
L[A] Did you want to be a creative from a young age?
Tim Hawkey: Growing up, I avoided the idea of creativity because my mother [Penny Hawkey] was a creative rock star. She broke new ground for women in advertising in the 80s. We had reporters from Forbes, Good Housekeeping and the Wall Street Journal coming to the house to interview the creator of the Coca Cola Mean Joe Greene spot. I don’t know how she did it all. For me, why would I enter into a space where that’s always going to be the comparison?
Later on, I was working as a cancer laboratory researcher, and I stumbled across a field of advertising called medical advertising – and that you needed to understand science to do it. Now this is something I would be highly specialized in and good at, and that was attractive. I put some portfolio sketches together and I went into Grey Healthcare Advertising. I pretty much got a job on my mother’s good name! Please can we give some credit to privilege? It’s absolutely a real thing. While my story is an extreme example of it, others are more subtle. There are entire sections of the population that not only don’t have a parent in advertising, but don’t even know that this is a field you can go into, or how to go about it. And that needs to be remembered when evaluating junior candidates or deciding where to spend your very limited mentorship time.
Being a leader in radically changing health advertising is not enough for the team at Area 23. What comes next may help redefine how we see health brands, explains the restless Chief Creative Officer Tim Hawkey.
L[A] Did you want to be a creative from a young age?
Tim Hawkey: Growing up, I avoided the idea of creativity because my mother [Penny Hawkey] was a creative rock star. She broke new ground for women in advertising in the 80s. We had reporters from Forbes, Good Housekeeping and the Wall Street Journal coming to the house to interview the creator of the Coca Cola Mean Joe Greene spot. I don’t know how she did it all. For me, why would I enter into a space where that’s always going to be the comparison?
Later on, I was working as a cancer laboratory researcher, and I stumbled across a field of advertising called medical advertising – and that you needed to understand science to do it. Now this is something I would be highly specialized in and good at, and that was attractive. I put some portfolio sketches together and I went into Grey Healthcare Advertising. I pretty much got a job on my mother’s good name! Please can we give some credit to privilege? It’s absolutely a real thing. While my story is an extreme example of it, others are more subtle. There are entire sections of the population that not only don’t have a parent in advertising, but don’t even know that this is a field you can go into, or how to go about it. And that needs to be remembered when evaluating junior candidates or deciding where to spend your very limited mentorship time.
L[A] Healthcare advertising wasn’t a sexy area at the time, though, was it?
TH It was an obscure field. In fact, DTC [direct-to-consumer] advertising for drugs did not exist then in the United States. It was only allowed, I think, around 1999. It’s still only the US and New Zealand that fully allow it.
The first 10 years of my career in health advertising, I wouldn’t call a creative time. I would call it foundation building. There was a formulaic and templated approach to brand advertising to doctors or to patients. As a result, my focus was on becoming just the best expert in the sector and the category. I still consider myself to be an expert but I have now transitioned into the creative half of my career, which started around 2011.
L[A] What happened to change it?
TH I was given the opportunity to take the leadership role at Area 23, along with my business partner, Renee [Mellas, Group President of Area 23 and IPG Health Canada] and that’s where the real creative part of my career began. Creativity did not get me the job, but the job got me creativity.
Tim's choice of Area 23 key works
https://youtu.be/CjA8tUSPM58?feature=shared
Unbreakable: Insmed
https://youtu.be/PJGgMzJb8qc?feature=shared
Magnetic Stories: Siemens Healthineers
https://youtu.be/XzGW2Dy2GjM?feature=shared
Eyedar: Horizon
https://youtu.be/NldzDjMnAF0?feature=shared
Free Killer Tan: Mollie’s Fund
https://youtu.be/HK7neSvCtjk?feature=shared
Sick Beats: Woojer
L[A] Why were you and Renee chosen?
TH I was always, I would say, the ambitious upstart. I sort of learned by just spending tons of time with clients and with account leaders and with strategists, learning the business and learning the strategy. I had a facility for talking about the business and driving it. And I had an ambition towards creativity. When I look back at it now, I would say that my actual creative abilities were not great, and I had not had enough real practice at it. But maybe for the time and for the sector at the time, it was a standout.
Why were we paired together? I don’t know, but we were a match made by my boss, Dana Maiman, the CEO of IPG Health. It was brilliant matchmaking. Renee is so important in this. I do not attribute Area 23’s success to myself, I attribute it to our partnership.
She’s from the South Bronx. She’s very street. She’s an incredible negotiator and a salesperson, but she’s also an incredible pessimist and a great counter to the way that I’m an incredible optimist. The relationship allows me to be so focused on opportunity and possibility because she is so focused on the impending doom of everything!
L[A] Would she see it that way?
TH Absolutely. She’s the one that is basically jumping on every crisis every day with clients. I’m there with her in the same way that she’s there with me, but her focus on threats allows me to focus on opportunities. It’s very freeing.
L[A] You are at opposite extremes.
TH It’s not just in our opposite temperament, but in our similarity, that it works. We have the same point of view on almost everything. We’re able to divide and conquer and to share one vision in most situations. But then we are good polar opposites in other complementary ways.
L[A] So, what happened when you initially got paired, how did you set course with Area 23?
TH It was a mission-strategy-tactic-cascade. We said: ‘What kind of agency do we want?’ The agency already existed but it was still early in its lifecycle and it had yet to be truly defined. We decided that it would be really differentiating in the pharma agency space to be all about creativity.
It was a little bit of a ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach. We decided that we were going to be about creativity without one really creative campaign to our name. We then put all of our effort in all of the decisions that we made into making that a reality.
L[A] Why was that not seen as a pretty wild risk?
TH I don’t think that it was a risk for this reason: nobody in the sector was then or now denouncing creativity. In fact, people always liked to talk about creativity. But it’s a matter of how you define creativity. Clients were fairly happy with the work that they were getting back then, and they considered it very creative. So, differentiating on creativity was actually a safe positioning to take.
But I knew we wanted to do things that no client wanted to do, and I knew that it would take probably 10-plus years to get them to do the things that we wanted them to do. So, it was a long-term plan of differentiating on creativity. We started with creating a couple of case studies that allowed us to attract the clients that we wanted to work with, then hoping that success would beget other success over time.
A really important tactic in that strategy is something that we call What If, which we introduced a few years into our stint at Area 23. It came out of realizing that our attempts to get clients to buy the work that we wanted them to buy were unsuccessful 90 out of 100 times, even 99 out of 100 times.
L[A] So, there was a lot of hitting your head against the wall.
TH Yes, a lot of effort with very little return. We theorized that when the clients come asking for something, like an ad for example, they already knew what it was supposed to look like. So, we thought that if we brought clients things that they didn’t ask for, proactively, then we would get them into a better buying mode. And if we brought them things that didn’t have any precedent, that may get them out of the habit of comparing the work to some standard.
A key reason why this model is enticing to our clients is that it allows us to respond to real-time market challenges for our brands. In this industry, we work in the FTE where our clients buy out each team member for the year based on a scope of work that is created, you guessed it, the year prior.
At most agencies, you’re just following this potentially out-of-date roadmap for an entire year. It does not allow you to respond to new threats, new situations, and new opportunities, or even to propose a new idea. We recognized that that was a huge deficiency for our clients. So, What If was our answer to that market need. What If gives back a percentage of time to all of the employees in our agency as non-billable time.
Essentially, it’s an agency-wide creative R&D budget. We expect people to use that time to come up with proactive strategies and creative ideas for our clients and to bring these to them on a regular basis.
L[A] So, the client’s not being charged for that.
TH That’s right. The client didn’t ask for it and the client didn’t pay for it. It gives us the permission to be extremely bold because we’re not going to piss a client off by showing them something that they didn’t ask or pay for, even if it’s over the top. It creates an important perception for the client that the agency has been investing their own time, so they may be a little more likely to engage. Honestly, over time that has worked. We initiated this in 2014.
L[A] And this was everybody, all departments?
TH This is all departments. I think the majority of the participation does come from the creative department and it’s kind of voluntary/ mandatory. It’s volumandatory!
An amazing proof point in this model is that, right from our first What If Throwdown, two teams presented two ideas that helped put us on the map as an agency. One was Free Killer Tan, which is a campaign to take on the tanning booth industry because of the risks of melanoma. We set up a fake tanning salon in Times Square; when people went into the back, they found it was their own funeral, and the tanning bed was a coffin. Their picture was on the memorial, there was an organist, pews, everything. This was our first shot out of the gate, and that was proof to us that, OK, we’re doing something right.
L[A] Who would buy that?
TH We pitched it to a very conservative pharmaceutical client of ours, who had a drug for melanoma. The pitch was a sincere one. We noted they made a drug for melanoma, and that they were going to make millions of dollars off of this drug for people who are already sick. Well, we said, what about the people who aren’t sick yet? They had the opportunity to prevent melanoma. They didn’t buy it.
So then we called Jack and Maggie Biggane, who had lost their 20-year-old daughter to melanoma, and they’d started Mollie’s Fund. To this day, 10 years later, they are a flagship NGO pro-bono client and we do creative for them every year. The work brought them into the spotlight and started a long legacy of them doing crazy creative things every year. What it said to the industry was that, ‘Hey, pharma agencies can do this fun stuff.’ It gave the other agencies permission to ask, ‘Why can’t we do it too?’
L[A] You didn’t really win any awards with it, though?
TH Entering awards is an art form in and of itself. If I knew then what I know today, it would have won a ton of stuff. But it definitely put us on the map. To our clients, we used that case study in new business pitches to kind of say, ‘This is the work that we like to do. If you like this kind of work, where bold creativity gets you a disproportionate share of voice, then work with us. If you don’t like this work, don’t work with us.’ We didn’t say that literally, but we said it without saying it.
That was the beginning of the creative portion of our career, where we actually had something and we could build on that success year after year. Since then, it’s really just been about beating our own record and getting better every year.
L[A] Was there a key client or key piece of work that switched the What If creativity from being for an NGO to being with a major commercial project?
TH That’s a good probe that touches on the evolution of our strategy. The thing that hasn’t changed has been our commitment to creativity and our commitment to and investment in What If. What has changed is the direction of the output for creativity. We had to partner with NGOs early on because none of our clients were willing to buy that kind of work. As we softened the industry up to it, they became more receptive. So, we were able to partner with a couple of flagship clients to bring that work into the pharmaceutical industry.
The first one that we had a lot of success with was Lilly, back around 2017 … And I see them recommitting to creativity these days. So, we’re excited to sort of rekindle that part of our relationship.
Another was a startup pharmaceutical company with no commercialized product who we partnered with on a number of creative campaigns. We helped build their brand and they helped build our brand. A Thousand Words About NTM [Nontuberculous mycobacteria] was probably the first thing that we did with them that was different, that was not just an ad campaign. What we gave them was more of an activation and something that challenged their creative sensibilities. Instead of telling everybody that a missed diagnosed of this respiratory disease is a bad thing, we would show it to them by listening to patients and collecting a thousand words from each one. A picture tells a thousand words, so we gave those thousand words to different artists around the world and had those artists create pieces that brought that to life.
It’s a formula now in pharma, but at the time, this was something that had never been done. And I think it actually created a kind of category of work that all agencies do now. It stood out for us at the time, and it was the start of a long creative relationship.
More recently, I would pick out our work with another rare disease company that went through an acquisition. They were 100% committed to creativity and enabled us to do a lot of amazing creative things.
In the evolution of What If, we have evolved to a strict adherence to looking for paid client work. We don’t need to practice anymore with NGOs. The practice years are over. Our goal as an agency is to transform the pharmaceutical industry, not to transform the pharma advertising sector. We really are trying to change the way that pharma clients operate.
TH I think it needs changing for personal reasons and for strategic reasons. For personal reasons, I don’t want to be a part of an industry that just thinks you should do things the way that they’ve always been done. I’d like to be able to have pride in the industry. I’m very excited about science and medicine and I would like the industry to be supported by great creativity as well. Those are my personal reasons.
My professional and strategic reasons are that creativity makes sense, period. Creativity is an economic multiplier. Creativity gets people to pay attention to what you want to say and that just makes plain business sense. It’s been demonstrated time and time again. The reason that I think the pharma industry has not adopted a basic principle of marketing is because the products are so differentiated and they’re amazing in and of themselves.
L[A] ‘We’ve got the best, or only, drug for this’ so that’s all they really need to say?
TH Yes, they may have a new drug that is going to save lives in a way that no one has ever been able to do in the past. There’s almost a preconceived notion that being creative on top of that is a disservice to the molecule itself. The message has really been the king in pharma. The product has really been the king in pharma because the products are so good. That’s why I don’t think any pharmaceutical brand can really be called a brand. If we’re really thinking about what brands are, brands are sort of the constellation of feelings, emotions, and associations that you have with a product. But if all of those things are purely transactional, then what you have are only product messages. There’s not a lot of brand affinity whatsoever because we’re selling products.
L[A] But some people would say at this point, that’s a good thing. You don’t have to add all the marketing sophistication … Why spend loads of time and money on that if you don’t need to?
TH In this day and age, just telling somebody that you have the ability to save their life is not enough to get the attention of somebody whose life needs saving. You need creativity to get people’s attention and to keep their attention and for them to remember what you told them. I firmly believe that the DTC advertising that we all hate so much, the stuff that’s on TV, has saved millions of lives because it has created informed customers who know a lot about their conditions. In some cases, they know more about a product than their physicians know. Patients’ branded requests for a product, which can be annoying to physicians, have actually resulted in a betterment of the health of the nation. I’m not just towing the industry line. I believe these things, and I also believe in the pharmaceutical industry.
L[A] So you are saying the pharma brands generally don’t stand for something? And if they want a better reputation, to be trusted more, then they need to work on really attaching brand values and making an emotional connection – start to really stand for something as brands, not just the seller of very useful products?
TH Yes, I think it’s possible. I do think it’s one of the more ethical industries. For all that there is the occasional and inevitable bad story, this industry is 99% very positive. It has great potential in branding.
L[A] This means moving away from everything being so sales-focused?
TH The opportunity in the pharma industry is a potential shift from sales and product to brand and to affinity.
But a key issue is that the life cycle of a pharmaceutical product in the US is about nine years of marketing. So, you have to start making your return on a billion-dollar investment on day one and maximize that until year nine. There is no 10-year brand building, there is no 100-year Coca-Cola legacy to build on top of. It’s a lot of differentiating your product in the here and now against the competitors.
That said, over the next few years, when you look at the landscape of the big pharmaceutical sectors, there are clear opportunities. For example, the weight loss sector, which is very much in the news. All the GLP-1/GIP agonists, Ozempic, and Zepbound, and everything. In five years, we will have a lot of not very differentiated products that are slicing a $150 billion pie. There is a huge opportunity to do brand building now. I can see a time when customers will stay on a product or choose a product because of how it makes them feel and because of how much they like it and not because it has a one-point difference on a scale.
That’s an approach that we are taking with some of our clients right now. We call it marketing beyond the molecule. The way I’ve explained it to clients is that it is less about brand building and more about doing the right thing. If we’re going to enter into this very intimate relationship with somebody about them putting the drug into their body, let’s do something beyond just selling them that molecule. Let’s make their life a little better. Let’s do something to improve their community.
An example of that is what we did with Eyedar for Horizon Therapeutics. We built an app for Horizon to help the blind see using echolocation. And for Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, which was launching a drug into the ALS space – the motor neurone disease space – we launched Mind’s Eye, a project to create an AI art generator for people who can’t move a muscle in their body except for their eyes. It was really an accessibility tool. Very early on in AI, I would add. Before the larger population were getting into Midjourney and so on, we had already created a user experience for people to express themselves through art, moving only their eyes.
I can see a future where the client is running a product ad and a brand ad simultaneously. The pharmaceutical ad isn’t going away. We still have to communicate information. But I can see a greater need for brand building.
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