Christmas seems to have come early for Klick Health, with a slew of new leaders arriving under the life sciences marketing agency’s metaphorical tree.
Klick announced the wave of new hires Wednesday. The 22 additions—spread across the agency’s client services, creative, growth, media, medical and strategy teams and scattered across North America, the U.K. and Singapore—hail from competing agencies, consumer product giants and Big Pharmas.
Among the new Klicksters is Graeme Read, who takes up the mantle of managing director for the agency’s Asia-Pacific region and whose nearly 40-year career in health and pharma marketing has been spent predominantly in various leadership roles within McCann Health’s own APAC business.
Elsewhere, the company welcomed a squadron of new creative directors to work under Chief Creative Officer Rich Levy, a trio of media strategy and planning VPs—including Chris Bannan, who previously served as a director of global channel excellence at AstraZeneca—and three new executive VPs of growth, including Eric Daly, who helped lead the omnichannel launch of Opdivo at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Rounding out the nearly two dozen appointments are a new group account director and a gaggle of scientific, medical comms and business strategy heads, including another pharma alum: Quentin O’Brien, whose decade of experience includes stops at Mallinckrodt and Orexo, and who joins Klick as a VP of scientific strategy, medical communications and innovation.
“We’re energized by the solid growth we’ve continued to see this year across the business and are beyond excited about the accomplished marketing leaders who have made their move to Klick,” CEO Lori Grant said in this week’s announcement.
“It’s very clear that there’s something different about joining an independent agency that has a people-centric culture, hacker roots, plays the long game, and prioritizes client outcomes,” she continued. “With the additions we’re announcing today, the strongest team in the industry just became even stronger.”
The hiring boom, which seemingly demonstrates Klick’s commitment to being “the world’s largest independent commercialization partner in life sciences,” continues a steady expansion the agency has undergone in recent years.
That growth has included the appointment of a new executive creative director earlier this year, along with multiple president- and director-level hires last year and multiple mass hiring sprees, including one that added 18 new leaders this past summer. Another such spree in late 2022 followed its snagging former Google Healthcare managing director Ryan Olohan as executive VP of growth.
Meanwhile, Klick has also expanded the business itself, tacking on “venture studio” btwelve, a new commercial solutions segment, a social influencer division and more since 2022.