Built for Purpose: The Power of Spectrum’s Strategic Platform

The last two weeks have seen a whirlwind of change across the agency landscape. First, with news that Edelman, the world’s largest PR agency, was consolidating brands and restructuring its business in an effort to enable more integrated selling. Less than a week later, Omnicom, one of the big five communications holding companies, announced it was acquiring IPG, another big 5, in what was described in industry trades and global business media as a “mega merger.” 

Richard Edelman spoke about a trend toward more integrated offerings and customers who want more centralized purchasing under one roof. Omnicom and IPG are touting their ability, as a combined entity, to better support large multi-national customers and to pool resources and capital to invest in technology and AI. All three organizations spoke of these moves as enabling innovation. 

Having spent my career in this wonderful industry, I recognize and value that there are innovative, talented people that inhabit agencies of all shapes and sizes, but I can say with certainty that bloated infrastructure, siloed structures and fragmented teams are the enduring enemies of agility and innovation.  

At the end of the day, the benefits of these seismic shifts in direction for some of the industry’s biggest names are directed at shareholders. But, in the agency world, we’re in the business of serving clients, and our partnerships have to meet and exceed their pace of innovation – and their expectations.  

With that in mind, I find myself continuously reflecting on what it is that enables incredible work and conversely, what holds it back. What is the configuration that unlocks an agency’s best and delivers the greatest value for clients?  

This has been our driving force in building what we call “the agency of the future” – the anti-holding company, if you will, that can be the difference, not only for our clients but for the immense talent we’re curated across our organization. We strive to break the mold of the traditional agency, as our potential defies its definition. 

Over the past 10 years, almost every decision we’ve made as we scaled Spectrum Science from a small healthcare PR agency to an international strategic platform offering integrated advertising, clinical trial recruitment, communications, marketing, media and consulting services exclusively focused on health and science, has been with this vision in mind.  

While the companies in the news are now moving toward a model that enables more integrated selling, we built our company with an “open floor plan”– an environment, both physical and virtual, free from walls, borders and barriers that need to be knocked down to productively collaborate.  

In our intentional expansion, we’ve incubated and acquired adjacent capabilities, welcomed them into our open space, and organized them under a single P&L model that incentives everyone in our business around shared success on behalf of our clients, regardless of where they sit.  

We’ve created a culture of connectivity, enabled cross-solving to deliver new and innovative solutions and moved nimbly to harness the power of AI to enhance our productivity, and our work.  

We’ve nurtured a partnership of similarly minded, independent healthcare agencies around the world, Global Health Marketing and Communications, fueled by relationships that span a decade or more and a stronger bench of local health knowledge than even the largest of holding companies can provide.  

We’ve remained vigilant about delivering differentiated customer service and embedded strategists in everything we do, earning the trust of clients and providing the ability to look at their business challenges in new or unexpected ways, without having to knock down walls to do so.  

It remains to be seen how all the integration, restructuring, and reconfiguring will play out at the mega holding companies, how staff will respond and what tangible benefits will be created for clients – not shareholders – of these companies.  It remains to be seen how hundreds of millions of dollars of cost savings and years of integration will benefit customers. But as we’ve seen time and again across the agency landscape, it’s exceedingly difficult to retrofit a calcified organization into a new model. To break through walls and silos to extract value, versus building an open floor plan from the ground up. 

In the meantime, we are deliberately and steadfastly working with clients that prioritize independence and agility in a partner, who celebrate the ease of getting the right cross-functional experts around the table without fuss.  

We will continue building our differentiated, collaborative strategic platform and accelerating our ability to meet the needs of life science companies big and small, at all stages in a product or company lifecycle.  

At Spectrum, the agency of the future is here – and evolving every day with fluidity and flexibility. No wrecking ball required.