Another decorated global healthcare agency is entering the Asia-Pacific market from Singapore, further shaking up the health communications business in Southeast Asia that has been seeing increased growth and competition from both established holdco agencies and new independent entrants.
Mumbai-based Medulla Communications, a health specialist agency that in 2016 won Healthcare Agency of the Year in Cannes with seven Lions and since decorated with multiple Effies, is setting up an Asia Pacific hub in Singapore to earn business throughout the region.
The new managing director of the APAC operations is Taffy Ledesma, a seasoned executive with extensive healthcare and FMCG experience, both as a marketing and brand manager at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Mead Johnson and Unilever, and more recently as the MD and country manager of both DDB and Hello Health Group, respectively, in Indonesia.
In an exclusive interview with Campaign, Ledesma and Medulla’s founder and managing director, Praful Akali, outlined their ambitious plans for Asia Pacific expansion. Since its beginnings in 2008, Medulla has already built a solid global business from its Mumbai headquarters with roughly 70 employees working for clients like Pfizer, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Ferring, Mylan, Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, Philips Medical Devices, Himalaya, BrainTap and many others. But with this expansion, Medulla is looking to serve such clients, alongside new ones, in the rapidly growing pharma and health and wellness markets of Southeast Asia.
While most major health communications agencies see the APAC region as a means to supplement their core global businesses, Medulla’s goal is for the Singapore-based Asia business to quickly become the core business engine, with Akali predicting it will surpass the agency’s Indian-based business by the end of year two.
While this might seem overly ambitious for an initial team of one in Singapore, with Ledesma now aiming to primarily hire account managers for Singapore and Southeast Asia rather than start with a large creative team, Akali argues that Medulla’s structure was built for this very purpose.
Creative ‘magic’
Noting that further expansion was always his goal and was already in the works before being sidelined by Covid, Akali is very proud of his creative team in India and its track record with global clients. Likening the creative team to that of an agency like Forsman and Bodenfors, Akali lays claim to a special culture that has been cultivated over time, which he does not wish to dilute.
“At Medulla we spend a lot of time and energy building the processes, teams, camaraderie and culture that can more often than not ensure that we land on the side of magic versus madness,” Akali says. “That formula is something we’re very keen to apply to different markets with teams that have won awards and created magic again and again. That’s why we’re unabashedly looking at having the core creative engine still very much in India.”
A prime example of the magic referenced by Akali is Medulla’s moving ‘Last Words’ campaign for the Indian Association of Palliative Care that won the agency two Gold Lions in Cannes almost a decade ago. On a recent trip to a Singapore healthcare conference, Akali showed the work and was approached by several marketers expressing there is still a gap in the market for such storytelling in healthcare, further reinforcing his desire to set up shop in the region.
Health client focus
Along with its ‘creative magic,’ Medulla will argue that its deeper understanding of industry and client sensibilities set it apart. Not only does their team boast no fewer than 15 employees with medical or life science degrees, but Akali and Ledesma both began their careers in consumer marketing on healthcare brands.
“I natively come from the client side,” Ledesma says. “So not only do I understand brand challenges, I understand also the interplay of how a certain function operates within a bigger ecosystem, what they’re measured for, how they might be thinking, tailoring the solutions based on their appetite for digital transformation, their appetite for communication and also the inner workings of their company because I was once an insider on on their side.”
With 60-75% of Medulla’s business coming from AOR accounts, client servicing will be critical, especially with creative teams based in Mumbai, which is why Akali feels Ledesma’s deep understanding of marketer needs is “a godsend” for the Asia business.
And while Ledesma’s top focus will be on regional business out of Singapore, his extensive experience in both Indonesia (Hello Health, DDB, J&J) and the Philippines (J&J, Mead Johnson, Unilever) mean those markets are also primary growth targets for the business.
“A lot of work gets done at the regional level so local connections are really important,” Ledesma says. “Indonesia is a key call out as one of the hottest, most progressively growing markets and when we look at the companies we plan to target as regional clients, they will have big Indonesian businesses as well.”
Digital delivery
Alongside its creativity and client-focus, a third key ingredient of Medulla’s special sauce is its digital nativeness. The agency bills itself as a “super-specialist” in digital healthcare communications since it not only produces campaigns for digital channels and social media platforms, but also has developed its own proprietary digital media platforms and network.
Using its database of three million healthcare professionals in Asia-Pacific, plus audience data across various advertising platforms, traffic scans and social listening, Medulla maps the digital journey of professionals, patients and consumers to reach out to niche audiences with content marketing relevant to their needs at a particular time.
The full-funnel offering means Medulla has its own performance marketing team and does all digital media planning (and most buying) in-house along with web development, API sharing and social media tool-building for clients.
But beyond this, Medulla is also developing its own digital healthcare content delivery channel for doctors to communicate with patients while offering an opening for brand engagement. Yet to be fully released, the platform known as Patient-Support.Asia, will enable doctors to provide their patients with personalised content through a prescription sticker with the doctor’s unique QR code that utilises voice-cloning technology so the patient can hear prescriptive instructions and treatment information from their doctor in their own voice to increase trust and prescriptive uptake by patients.
Working within legal frameworks and local regulations, the platform would be licensed in its first phase by healthcare organisations growing the use of specific therapies for their medical service clinics and providers with all content in the communications vetted by the prescribing doctor. Healthcare brands would support the therapy through an educational grant with no provisions for further information or content that could prevent the prescription or treatment information from being brand-biased in any way.
While this product, still in development, is an exciting future prospect for the agency, its founder appears more focused on the cause behind Medulla’s health and wellness mission than its lucrative potential.
Indeed, Akali is most animated when continually referencing how important communications are in healthcare for influencing consumer behaviour and changing lives and how central that is to his expansion goals.
“We’re very lucky to be in healthcare marketing,” Akali says, “because it is one space where we can impact the lives of people, but also more meaningfully grow our brands at the same time. So let’s make the most of what we can do.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
