One of the most seasoned life sciences advertising executives in the game has turned over a new leaf, pivoting to the CEO seat at commercial services provider Eversana’s global health agency arm, Eversana Intouch.
Mike Guarino joins Eversana Intouch after two decades in senior leadership roles at FCB Health, co-founding Area 23 and most recently serving as chief commercial officer at IPG Health. With a resume packed with some of the most well-known agency names in the pharma marketing sphere, Guarino wasn’t looking to take on a new role for the sake of it, instead being “very choiceful” regarding his next move, he told Fierce Pharma Marketing in an interview.
(Eversana)
After several meetings with the Eversana Intouch team over many weeks, Guarino came to the same conclusion again and again: “this just feels right,” he recalled.
Guarino’s appointment was attributed to his “leadership, industry perspective, and passion for innovation,” making him “exactly the right person to lead our agency services forward as we continue to redefine what modern life sciences marketing will be,” Eversana CEO Mark Thierer said in a company release.
With the new leadership, Eversana Intouch’s founder Faruk Capan will now turn his focus primarily to Eversana’s dedicated AI agency platform, a Google Cloud collaboration that launched last August.
Eversana Intouch was created in 2022 to act as Eversana’s full-service healthcare marketing agency within the wider umbrella of the company’s global commercialization services. The agency offers a “single, AI-powered operating model” that’s meant to replace “fragmented agency handoffs,” according to its website.
Through its innovative approach, Eversana Intouch steps away from the traditional agency structure and instead dives head-first into the AI-powered landscape that the marketing world has been steadily evolving toward. The company’s AI-based framework is woven in across the “entire commercialization process,” Guarino explains.
AI done ‘the right way’
AI has gotten something of a bad rep across creative fields as its influence has spread across industries, with some fearing that the technology could signal the end of human involvement in certain spaces. Guarino likens this critique to many of the past, across “all of the different technological innovations that people have said were going to be the death of humanity and mankind.”
The new Eversana executive is clear that AI is not nor can it ever be a “replacement” for people. But if done “the right way,” the evolving technology can be “enabling.”
“We’re still here,” he mused. “I think the reality is the way that we work in tandem with those technologies really dictates how we’re going to succeed as an agency, as a group, as a country, as a people.”
For his part, Guarino brings to Eversana what may be a unique take for a healthcare marketing agency leader: “it’s not about healthcare,” he said. Instead, it’s about improving the lives of people.
To do so, healthcare marketers who want to keep up may have to be prioritize being able to be “nimble, to be able to change quickly, to be flexible, adaptive,” he listed.
“Technology is changing the way that we all work,” Guarino said, but “being able to embrace it, to get comfortable in the gray, where there is no clear black or white, is going to help us to be successful.”
As emerging technologies have made it easier for patients to become “more active in the management of their diseases,” the role of agencies has continued to evolve as well, he said.
Historically, the way advertisers talk to patients and physicians has been “very segmented,” he explained, congregating largely in advertising to the doctor with some direct-to-patient mixed in. Now, “you can’t think about it that way,” according to Guarino.
“The entire continuum from early commercialization, before the product even launches, when they’re doing clinical trials, to understanding what data points need to be part of the clinical trial, to what that means to a doctor and to a patient…it’s all connected,” Guarino explained.
This, he said, is where Eversana “sits perfectly.” The agency is in a prime position to be “connecting the dots” along said continuum, which, he notes, could be a broader metaphor for “the way we should be managing our lives.”
“You can’t just think about a health issue when you’re in crisis. Every single thing that you do is connected,” he said. “And that’s what we’re here for, to connect all those pieces so people can live the lives they want to live.”
