Medea Communications launches
pharmafile | September 15, 2009 | News story | Medical Communications |Â Â MedeaÂ
Medea Communications, a new medical education agency, was launched this week by former directors from PR agency Fleishman-Hillard.
Set up by Kate Hawker and Charlotte Florence, the agency is based in south-west London and backed by Macclesfield-based healthcare comms company InforMed Direct.
InforMed has a majority shareholding in the new entreprise and Hawker and Florence, who each hold a minority stake the Medea will be able to call on InforMed’s editorial and project delivery expertise as required
“That sort of resource is available in the short term and perhaps the long term,” Hawker says. “It is nice to have that backup.”
As well as having a strong market research capability, InforMed has a pharma marketing training arm.
“InforMed also do interesting things with digital interactive technology,” Hawker added.
The company uses web-based platforms to get doctors on its advisory boards to comment on issues, for example.
“We’ll be looking at that technology from a new business point of view,” says Hawker.
“We’re quite interested in working up activity around new technology so companies keen to experiment within that would be quite useful.”
“Out model should be quite appealing to pharma companies,” she continues. “We have both been in the industry some time.”
Florence previously worked at The Remedy, Burson-Marsteller and spent a decade with GlaxoSmithKline spending time in both medical sales and clinical development.
Meanwhile, Hawker was with agencies MediTech Media, Shire Hall and Ethical Communications before founding The Remedy, which became Fleishman-Hillard’s med ed division.
She argues that start-up status will enable her and Florence to devote their time to clients, rather than handing work over to account executives.
“We are going to be leading all the work in the initial stages,” she says. “So clients will get access to the senior people.”
Fleishman-Hillard has folded The Remedy into its healthcare PR division and Hawker says this process “accelerated” her move to leave and set up her own agency with Florence. “It triggered our discussions,” she says.
“Fleishman-Hillard were looking at integrating the PR and med ed teams and this didn’t appeal to me,” Hawker adds.
“One of the reasons we wanted to set up on our own was to get back to working with clients.”
Meanwhile the newly-combined Fleishman-Hillard Healthcare team is led by the agency’s head of healthcare PR, Lorna Baxter.
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