Ogilvy Health taps new executive creative director in a return to the holding company where his career started

Creative director Toby Trygg is home again at Ogilvy. This time, though, he's taking on the role of executive creator director for Ogilvy Health.

Trygg began his career at Ogilvy in consumer advertising in the late '90s, working on brands including Jaguar, Reese’s and then-dominant telecom GTE Wireless. He first dabbled in healthcare with a nonprofit New York City project that tested DNA and analyzed social factors in cancer in kids.

However, Trygg found his home in pharma and healthcare while working on the launch of the first drug to treat Non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder in blind patients. The client insisted on using actual blind people, not actors, in the commercial. Several months into the campaign, Trygg met many of the blind people who worked on the ads at an event at the National Federation for the Blind. Every one of them thanked him, but he demurred, saying that he wasn’t the one who invented the drug that helped them.

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“And they said, ‘No, but thanks to the commercial my father saw, or the radio commercial that my brother heard in the car, we got wind of this treatment,’ ” he said. “… I realized then that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life in terms of using my creative capabilities to really inform people and make a creative difference in their lives.”

Along with his passion for pharma and health communications, Trygg has a keen interest in technology. He was recently named by Facebook at one of the top 15 leaders in social media in the pharma industry and is a founding and current member of Facebook’s Health Advisory Panel.

Trygg recently worked as an adviser on RB's Mucinex TikTok campaign and is excited for pharma to grow its presence on that social media channel, as well as others. However, he noted he does not have a particular devotion to social channels, but instead an affinity for the most effective media.

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“What I’ve learned is how to amortize capturing content. Because it’s no longer disseminated only via TV commercials, but all that content is used for social media channels as well. My passion is using whatever the right medium is to get the message to the right person. And that’s why I’m so passionate about the use of social media,” he said, citing far-better-than-average ROI measures that he’s had in the past using channels like Instagram Stories to hyper-target consumers.

Trygg was most recently senior vice president, group creative director at McCann Health. At Ogilvy Health, he will report to Chief Creative Officer Samantha Dolin.