Around this time last year, AbelsonTaylor Group president Jeff Berg characterized 2022 as a period of “treading water” at the venerable company. Asked to give a similar big-picture assessment for 2023, he reaches for a different metaphor.
“We were swimming in a sprint — an Olympic gold-medal race,” he says.
Following a year in which revenue fell 7.2%, AT rebounded in 2023 with a 17% jump to $70.2 million from 2022’s $60.1 million. The growth came on the back of new business success, with AT adding assignments from Radius Health, PharmaEssentia and Acelyrin to a roster that counts Takeda, Biogen, CSL Behring and Astellas Pharma among its mainstays.
Berg says the gains were hard-earned. “We got there through a lot of key initiatives, focusing on efficiency and doing what we do best,” he explains. “We’ve been doing resource management for a while, but we really amped it up and we got the buy-in. You can have all kinds of procedures and policies, but sometimes the cultural shift of people adopting something new takes time.”
Overall head count ticked down from 284 full-timers at the outset of 2023 to 283 at its conclusion, but the agency bulked up with the additions of EVP, chief creative officer Janet Barker-Evans, formerly SVP, executive creative director at Hawkeye; director of performance media James Hesdon, formerly SVP and media director at Inizio Evoke’s Philadelphia outpost; and media director Terence Prudhomme, formerly global marketing lead for media and partnerships at Balsam Brands. AT also debuted additional media planning/buying and media-mix modeling capabilities.
To hear EVP, director of client services Lynnette Hunter tell it, the integration of media planning and buying with the agency’s other services has become a true differentiator for AT.
“We house media account planning, engagement, strategy and measurement under the umbrella of an integrated strategy team,” she explains. “They’re very connected, sharing knowledge of the customer, the brand and the science. You don’t get that when you work with four different agencies that aren’t under the same roof. Things get lost in translation.”
And like everyone else, AT has its eyes on AI. Berg emphasizes its potential to drive new operational efficiencies.
“It provides an opportunity for us to be more effective and efficient in how we get simple things done, like writing internal memos,” he notes. “We’re playing around with a bunch of different platforms and we have a task force working on it.”
Hunter agrees with Berg’s assessment, adding, “We’re not using AI to sell a logo or anything like that. We are using it to help inspire our creative team, to be more efficient with getting those ideas out on paper and then deciding how to bring them to the client.”
Looking forward, Hunter is confident in AT’s ability to thrive in an atmosphere in which clients need “to defend every dollar.” To that point, the agency will focus on quantifying the effectiveness of its work. “We have to measure and show that the ideas and the growth we imagine for a business are truly happening,” she says.
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Work we wish we did
Fitchix, from Honest Egg, is an Australian campaign that infused technology and data to address the lack of transparency in a commoditized egg-farming industry that had long touted the benefits of free-range chickens. Leveraging the trend of wearable technology, the campaign utilized step trackers designed for chickens to count the average number of steps for birds at Honest Egg farms. This data was then printed directly onto eggs for consumers to see. This creative use of tech and data differentiates a brand and fosters trust. — Hunter
