INSIDE
The driving force in the healthcare market
WEFRA is turning 90
Healthy birthday! 90 years full of dedication to ‘healthy living’ – such is the history of healthcare communications agency WEFRA LIFE. Starting in the 1930s as an agent selling advertising space and employing only just a handful of team members, the company developed over the following decades into a broad-based and diverse advertising agency in the modern sense with roughly 200 talented communication professionals. The foundation for its success? A willingness to see change as an opportunity for progress and being not only a stakeholder, but rather the driving force in the healthcare market thanks to an ability to innovate constantly.
With 90 years of company history, WEFRA LIFE is celebrating a proud anniversary this year – and will not be stopping either! Alongside a passion for healthcare, it is precisely this openness to questioning the status quo, accepting change and growing in step with new developments that laid the foundation for many years of success. Occasionally, the company even demonstrates its openness to innovation by making deep-reaching changes internally. Five years ago, the agency transformed from a matrix-structured group of companies consisting of one holding company and eight limited company silos into a modern, agile ecosystem with innovative services – a reshaping that was planned like the launch of a new agency and involved a new legal company form, too.
To emphasise the aspect of ‘healthy living’, which is what the work of many of our clients revolves around, the opportunity was taken to change the company’s name at the same time. WEFRA Advertising Agency became WEFRA LIFE. ‘WEFRA has repositioned itself multiple times over the last 25 years to keep up with constantly shifting requirements,’ explains Director and CEO Matthias Haack, ‘The advantage of being an owner-operated agency is being able to take charge of such changes. Our success shows that we had the right idea.’
A finger on the pulse of the times
For him, innovativeness means registering change as early as possible and leveraging it for his own work. This demands sophisticated intuition and experience as well as a deep data basis, as Matthias Haack knows, ‘We have very active antennae when it comes to new trends. Thanks to our data-driven Innovation Hub, we are often even able to anticipate developments. This keeps clients one step ahead of their competitors because they already know today what challenges and opportunities there will be tomorrow.’ A more recent example of this progressiveness is the realisation of programmatic display campaign placement after login across nearly all HCP platforms, running automated in real time, without cookies and without ad waste. Furthermore, there is currently a venture for a medicinal cannabis platform (MediCade) preparing for launch. ‘Cannabis will have a major role in healthcare in the future,’ Matthias Haack predicts, ‘With our new investment in the start-up MediCade and its first product ASAYA™, our goal is no less than to revolutionise the medicinal cannabis market in Germany in 2023.’When developing ultra-effective media strategies, WEFRA LIFE taps into the best of two worlds: extensive healthcare expertise gained over nine decades combined with ultra-modern tools for improving the return on media investment. This results in customised solutions for its clients: a completely connected media mix, from classic media such as TV, radio and print to digital channels such as display, online video, social media and search marketing as well as programmatic advertising. In addition to their many years of experience, the media experts make use of exclusive AI-based tools such as OTC Brand Investor to raise effectiveness and efficiency. The core target audience insights, based on things such as penetration studies for the three major indications of diabetology, cardiology and pneumology, continue to define the direction of the experts’ work, too. Here, WEFRA LIFE also has an ambition of being a driving force with the most relevant target audience insights and most sophisticated data for media usage.
Thanks to the combination of established healthcare competence and a range of state-of-the-art tools, WEFRA LIFE stands very well-equipped for any kind of challenge, including international ones: ‘We offer infrastructure and expertise for the roll-out of international projects,’ Matthias Haack comments, ‘Our clients receive outstanding campaigns, platforms with a pull factor instead of a push factor, consumer communication that creates long-term brand fans; and activating appeals to demanding specialist target audiences that treat them as peers.’ The company also finds it important to support promising start-ups: ‘And of course we also develop ideas and products for the future ourselves.’