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Out-of-home advertising company, Brite Media Group, has acquired Mesmerize Marketing, a leader in patient education at the point-of-care. “Gregory Leibert, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mesmerize, and Craig Mait, Chief Operating Officer, will join Brite Media in leadership roles and will continue to operate the Mesmerize business along with their existing team,” outlined the news release.

With Mesmerize's “targeted educational materials including wallboards, literature distribution, branded medical essentials, and mobile integration to patients and care givers in waiting rooms, exam rooms, and other high traffic areas of doctors’ offices, dental offices, community-based organizations, AIDS service organizations, and independent pharmacies,” Brite Media now has strong access to the point-of-care space. In return, “[t]he partnership with Brite Media gives Mesmerize Marketing the resources necessary to scale our rapidly growing point-of-care networks,” said Leibert. “Mesmerize will also look to expand our patient education and deliver significant results to our customers, by supplementing our industry-leading static media presence with new static and digital media platforms.”

Michael Ellis, Brite Media’s President and Chief Operating Officer, added that “Mesmerize will perfectly complement Brite’s current media platforms.  The combined companies will leverage the strengths, creativity, and human capital of both businesses to continue delivering outstanding results to our customers.” Brite Media had been acquired by The Beekman Group in 2014. Since then, Brite Media “has more than doubled in size through organic growth and acquisitions led by Beekman and management.”

Andrew Schirmer has taken on the role of Chief Executive Officer with Ogilvy CommonHealth North America, a WPP Health & Wellness company. He returns to his roots, having started his career with the company in 1987. Schirmer was most recently President with McCann Global Health, overseeing the firm's global and public health unit. According to the news release, he was “responsible for leading the work the agency did for UNICEF, the US government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and private sector organizations, and the groundbreaking ‘Immunity Charm' campaign, which tracks vaccinations on behalf of the Afghanistan Health Ministry, and for which the agency won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2017.”

Mike Hudnall, CEO of WPP Health & Wellness, stated in the news release: “Andrew exemplifies the values we hold dear: excellence in client partnership, support for our incredible people, and an unbridled passion for making the world a better and healthier place. His professionally diverse background in healthcare marketing, consumer wellness, and public health and policy positions him well to help accelerate OCH’s diversification and growth strategy moving forward. Andrew is a champion of great work and true visionary who will bring a human-centered leadership to OCH’s culture. I have complete confidence that Andrew is the right person to unlock the potential of our people and our business as we move forward.”

Schirmer will report directly to Hudnall and work closely with Marc Weiner, Ogilvy CommonHealth's COO; Darlene Dobry, managing partner; and Terry Cully, managing director in Canada. Schirmer fills the vacant CEO position after Matt Giegerich's departure in spring 2017. Giegerich founded his own company, Lucky 7 Consulting, before becoming CEO with Inception Companies, a leading provider of video production, interactive visual solutions, broadcast and webcast platforms for virtual meetings, and audio/visual support.

As a company whose products impact the lives of millions of people, many of them managing serious health conditions, we are aware of how societal trends have transformed the way people relate to their health and have evolved their expectations of companies like ours.

So when we decided to launch a new brand positioning, we not only wanted to build an identity that spanned specialty and generics and unified our businesses around the world after decades of acquisitions, but also one that positioned us as a trustworthy partner to the patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals we serve.

To look within and beyond our medicine cabinet with a fresh perspective, we got out of our laboratories and into the real world, asking questions and listening carefully to the answers. From 2015 to 2017, we talked to more than 21,000 patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals in 20 countries. The simplest insights gained from this research have proved to be the most profound:

• Few things matter more to people than their health, and they want to feel in control of their journey at every stage of life, both in terms of prevention and in the challenges of managing a disease. They use digital resources to seek out information they can understand from sources they can trust.
• Consumers’ experience of service in other categories has created high expectations. They are looking for personalization, value, convenience, and relationships. Half of people want pharmaceutical companies to connect with them—online and on mobile—to provide on-demand resources and services.
• Health means much more than diseases. We learned that people want a holistic experience that addresses their whole person: body, mind, and spirit. This includes health inputs like nutrition and medicine, health outputs like confidence and vitality, and long-term health outcomes like resilience and happiness.

These insights have proved vital as Teva has gone through an important transformation, unifying the company while also becoming simpler, leaner, and more agile. It’s not easy to form a new understanding of a company that’s been around since 1901, and launching a new brand during a restructuring isn’t necessarily intuitive. But our research helped us to understand that consumers expect us to support their health journeys, leveraging our experience to go beyond medicines to the effects of their conditions on their whole lives. And they also want to know about the company itself—insights about the character of our people, what we care about, and how we give back.

Our new brand identity emphasizes that Teva is warm, approachable, accessible, and modern—a company that not only makes high-quality products but also one that listens to the people it serves. Ever mindful of our financial situation, we used existing resources in new ways, focusing on evolving the most impactful touch points to people—packaging and digital—while taking advantage of portfolio optimization, regulatory requirements such as serialization, product launches, office moves, and planned events where possible. Through it all, we’ve focused on evolving our value proposition, incorporating storytelling into our digital content offering, and making our new brand a vehicle for unification and simplification.

We’re implementing the new global brand from the bottom up, through a hyperlocal implementation approach that goes market by market with a meticulous test-and-learn rollout grounded in data and insights. To build local relevance into a global framework, we are evolving our value proposition to reflect the nuances of each market, including our business model and portfolio; the local healthcare system; and the specific needs of that market’s consumers, patients, and healthcare professionals. We started with our own employees, soft-launching the brand internally in 2016 to assess the resonance and relevance of the new positioning in different cultures and healthcare systems. Since then we’ve launched in France, Russia, and Argentina, and are rolling out the new brand in Canada and the U.S. this month, with additional launches planned throughout 2018.

In the U.S., for example, where people are more likely to suffer from chronic issues (65% versus 60% globally), we’ve partnered with Mount Sinai Hospital to meet the needs of those with multiple chronic conditions. And in Canada, where 37% of people are caregivers—supporting loved ones who could not cope without them—we’ve teamed up with caregiver advocacy groups to better support that underserved population.

And to deliver the credible online health information that patients around the world are seeking, we’ve piloted a series of articles, videos, and podcasts with the help of Healthline and the Slate Media Group. In the coming months, we’ll introduce a branded portal—first to the U.S. and then to the rest of the world—as well as a documentary film demonstrating what it’s like to be a patient with chronic conditions.

Our research has shown that digital is a cost-effective, convenient, and preferred way for us to bring value to patients and caregivers through information and resources that go beyond medicine, looking at health conditions from the point of view of patients in the context of their lives—not in the context of symptoms and side effects—which is critical to delivering on our brand promise of helping them to live better days.

Beyond gathering valuable insights and information—and meeting a lot of interesting people—our research is helping us become a simpler and more patient-centered organization, aiming to increase the trust people have in us to support their health needs.

Click here to read Teva's news release about their new brand positioning and visual identity.