Klick Health is adding some bench strength to its management team by luring a trio of health-care executives, including the former president of Havas Health as its first chief growth officer.
Doug Burcin spent 17 years running Havas Health’s 60 offices and 2,500 employees prior to joining Klick as CGO. He told Marketing the opportunity emerged through a colleague at Google Health who introduced him to Klick CEO Leerom Segal.
“What was really attractive for me was the idea of creating the agency of the future,” he said. “The current agency model, as it stands and as we’ve known it, has come under a lot of challenges. It’s stressed out and it’s not delivering on what today and tomorrow’s clients are looking for.”
Burcin said his role starts with looking closely at current client relationships and ways to accelerate their growth. The second area will be focused on looking at the broader health-care market for new revenue streams, the development of new technologies and opportunities to create proprietary products. Third, Burchin said he would be looking at the compensenation model by which agencies have traditionally been paid.
“I think there are opportunities to shake that up for mutual gain, on both the client and agency side,” he said. “The debate [about the agency of the future] is not a new one, but in this case the debate is more about what it looks like, how is it going to work.”
In addition to Burcin, Klick said Leslie Jamison, a former managing director at In-Sync, would become its new senior vice-president of brand strategy. Michael Young, former vice-president of business development for clinical development organization Parexel, will become vice-president of strategy at Klick’s Sensei Labs. Burcin said that as the new group gets to know each other, there will be an emphasis on remaining true to the firm’s entrepreneurial roots and a focus on real-time marketing in health-care.
“Health care is so dynamic and fluid,” he said. “The clients really want everything faster, better, cheaper, but also tied back to their other investments.”
While Klick has been growing its presence in the U.S., it has also been continuing to invest in the Canadian market by bringing its Muse event to Toronto late last year.
