Hill Holliday Health launches inside its Boston-based parent agency

Boston ad agency Hill Holliday has been doing pharma and healthcare work for years. But not many people seemed to know about it. So last week, the agency created a health-specific branded agency within itself with the launch of Hill Holliday Health.

The agency made a conscious decision years ago to not brand as a healthcare agency in order to stand out with its consumer approach in the busy healthcare marketing arena, managing director Scott Rabschnuk explained. But more recently, Hill Holliday discovered that, especially when it came to recruiting health marketing talent, people would say they “didn’t even know you guys did healthcare."

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“We realized we weren’t on the radar, so we were having a hard time attracting talent and we probably weren’t getting our fair share of at-bats with clients,” he said. “We can still be that consumer-oriented healthcare organization and our work speaks for itself, but we need to brand ourselves and give ourselves an identity so that both prospective clients as well as great industry talent, knows we’re on the map.”

The 120-person workforce of Hill Holliday Health will continue its work for pharma clients such as Novartis and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen for brands Xarelto and Invokana, as well as pitch for new business and look to hire more healthcare talent.