The 30th Annual Communicator Awards Announces IPNY’S Dana-Farber Campaign, Momentum of Discovery, A Winner

The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA) chose IPNY’s campaign for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Momentum of Discovery, as a winner in the category of Campaign-Medical & Pharmaceutical. The campaign reflects the long history of Dana-Farber making significant discoveries and innovating the way cancer is treated around the world. In fact, IPNY’s research revealed that “over the past five years, Dana-Farber research has contributed substantively to 51% of all FDA-approved cancer drugs.”

The Communicator Awards is the leading global awards program honoring creative excellence for marketing and communications professionals. Founded three decades ago, the Communicator Awards is an annual competition recognizing the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and design.

The awards are sanctioned and judged by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from acclaimed brand and media, interactive, advertising, and marketing firms including: GE Digital, Spotify, Condè Nast, Disney, Accenture Song, Superfly, Fast Company, and many others.

With over 3,000 entries received from across the US and around the world, the Communicator Awards is the largest and most competitive awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals. The competition celebrated its 30th anniversary this year with a pledge to honor timeless communication.

To view the winning work, visit the Winners Gallery.

See aiva.org for more information.

As published in MM&M

In the coming year, healthcare providers will become better acquainted with the uses for and limitations of Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, we’ll get a better feeling for where it can have a positive impact, how to manage it, and how to advocate for its use to internal and external stakeholders. We will become less fearful of using AI correctly. As the saying goes, “AI won’t replace us. But someone who knows how to use it correctly will.” — Andy Semons, founder, strategic planning partner, IPNY

Awarded at a live event celebrating healthcare leaders.

Below is the nomination letter by Bruce Lee, IPNY’s Founder and Chief Creative Officer, that beautifully summarizes Andy’s skills and talents.

This past May marks the first decade that IPNY has been in business. Which is an accomplishment at a time when most startup agencies don’t make it past the first year. There are many reasons why IPNY has had such good fortune. One of the most significant is Andy Semons. 

As one of our three Agency Founders and head of Strategic Planning, Andy has been an inspiration from the moment we opened our doors. We opened them with no clients and no income and within two weeks we had both, thanks to Andy’s skill and persuasiveness. The client was The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). They needed a brand film. But having done little advertising, they had no brand to speak of. Andy suggested doing some discovery research to find out what made LLS distinctive as a cancer research organization. The interviews Andy conducted within the organization and with leading scientists gave us a wealth of insight into the extraordinary impact LLS has had on the cancer landscape. This strategic work became the rock-solid foundation of “Someday is Today”, IPNY’s pioneering first healthcare campaign. In less than one year it put LLS on the map as a leading-edge charitable organization and produced an unprecedented lift in donations. And it set the bar for the kind of kind of creative IPNY has produced ever since: Beautifully crafted work that makes scientific and medical breakthroughs easy to understand without diminishing how revolutionary they are.    

Year after year, Andy has been MVP in helping our agency grow. From groundbreaking work for LLS we went on to create brand-building communications for City of Hope Medical Center, an influential California-based cancer research hospital that desperately needed national awareness. Andy’s strategic vision inspired the much-imitated creative campaign, “The Miracle of Science with Soul”, that not only raised record awareness levels but brought IPNY even more recognition (winning the MM&M Awards Grand Prize, among many others) and significant new business wins, including Dana-Farber Cancer Center, for whom we’ve created two brand campaigns that have given this top five research hospital the recognition it has never achieved in over 70 years.

Healthcare is not the only category of work IPNY engages in, but over ten years it has become our most rewarding business sector. During the worst of the COVID crisis we were called on by the biotech innovator Regeneron to help introduce a new class of therapies, monoclonal antibodies, for high-risk COVID-19 patients. Andy’s strategic ingenuity set the course for an essential digital and multi-media public service education program that succeeded by every measure. And his leadership on the recent win of a healthcare nonprofit has, at the time of this writing, sold in a campaign that will have a major effect on pediatric cardiac health in over 80 emerging countries around the world.

IPNY is a big agency packed in a small frame. Every player must punch above his or her weight. No one epitomizes that more than Andy Semons. He is a marketer with over 40 years of experience working on influential campaigns too numerous to mention. At Ogilvy & Mather he devoted years to growing their healthcare practice, including many notable DTC and OTC campaigns. His humanity is evident from the moment you meet him. People love to talk to him. He is genuinely interested in who they are and what they know and it’s astounding what he gets them to reveal. I’ve been working as his creative partner for decades now and I can honestly say that Andy’s touch always makes our work deeper, smarter, and more honest. 

I can’t think of anyone more deserving of this nomination than Andy Semons.

Q&A with Managing Director Tom Steadman as published in AdForum.com

The harsh reality of the post-COVID virtual agency pitch process.

What is your view of the current climate in terms of new business opportunities and process? What has changed in the last few months and what is your forecast for the rest of the year?

There’s definitely new business to win but finding it these days is certainly more challenging. “New from new” new business is understandably, way more difficult. The last few months have made it nearly impossible to forge new relationships and we all know that the way to win new business is through strong, positive relationship building. We’re continuing to carry on dialogue with our new business prospects. I’d say patience and empathy are probably the two most important traits needed right now. We need to understand that the client’s decision to switch their AOR or award a project to a new agency during these times will require serious thought and understanding of the both near and long-term environment in which they’re operating.

That said, there’s nothing holding us back from expanding our business with our current clients. In fact, the trusted relationships that have been forged over the years with many of our current and past clients get called into action when clients are thrown into unique, stressful market conditions. Our core clients from the healthcare, nonprofit and financial services sector have all remained active in the market over the past few months. Of course, we’ve maintained dialogue, modified strategy and tactics where appropriate and managed to earn a few new projects along the way. These new projects were awarded based on the strength of the relationship, the mutual respect and understanding we have with our clients and smart, targeted promotion defined to help our clients business stand out during these challenging times.

How challenging was it to develop an idea for a pitch across your creative, research and growth teams, without being able to collaborate in the same physical space? How did you overcome those challenges?

IPNY’s basic philosophy has been to encourage working remotely. Operating as a virtual agency is nothing new. We’re very comfortable working within a virtual business model and have learned how to develop winning integrated ideas while not sharing the same physical space.

Everyone plays a key role in developing our ideas. Strategic insights, Media Planning, Creative, Production, Public Relations and Account Management all share equally in the development of our work. The team is accustomed to working with one another as we’ve known each other both professionally and personally for years. As such we have no issues reaching out to one another in the development stages of our ideas.

One of our more recent pitches challenged us to develop a campaign that had little-to-no media support with the assumption that it would leverage the use of PSA’s. Therefore, it became critical to the success of our idea to understanding the media landscape around PSA’s so that we could instill confidence in the client that the spots would actually air. Our ideas leveraged insights to deliver powerful messaging for the target audience, but also took into consideration that in order to run they would need to capture the attention of the local market station managers.

To help bring the idea to life and to confirm its value, we were able to quickly pull together some market research. The focus groups were all held online and the entire pitch team was able to take part, which furthered the continuity and development of our pitch preparations.

As published in fastcompany.com written by David Zax

It was when Bruce Lee was working on the bent-penis project that he started to wonder about the direction of his career. It was 2011. Lee, an adman who happens to share a Kung Fu master’s name, had opted to go freelance in recent years, which had proven lucrative enough. But the projects were frustrating.

He was rounding 60 and had already had a big career. His fondest memories were perhaps of his time at Scali, McCabe, Sloves, where he’d spent three years in the ’80s as creative director; it was the place where he recalled being consistently rewarded based on craftsmanship and the quality of the work. He went on to a series of other executive creative director gigs at major agencies like Wunderman and OgilvyOne.

In the late 2000s, Lee decided to try his hand at freelancing. He’d always envied the high-priced freelancers he’d used to hire himself. He teamed up with an old colleague named Jill McClabb. But by the time they got the bent-penis assignment, the bloom was off the rose.

It wasn’t that the subject matter failed to interest. Quite the opposite: Lee had become quite invested in the project, which raised awareness around Peyronie’s disease (and “it’s not funny–it’s terrible,” says Lee). Rather, it was that as a freelancer for hire, he didn’t have any power. He didn’t have control. He did good, creative work, and the people who hired him picked it to death; the work never even ran.

“They’d pick at little things in the creative, and pretty soon there’s no more creative left,” recalls Lee.

After a particularly frustrating meeting, he walked back to the narrow room reserved for freelancers. (In earlier phases of his career, he’d had big, grand offices. Now he shared cramped quarters with McClabb and three other freelance teams.) That was when it hit him.

He looked at McClabb and said, “How would you feel if we started our own agency, and didn’t have to deal with this bullshit anymore?”

Soon enough, they started thinking about other people to call. They thought about Andy Semons.

By 2011, Semons was in his early 50s, and also at a frustrating moment in a long ad career.

Semons is a “third-generation ad brat,” he says (his father and grandmother were both in the business), “born to be in the business.” He started his career at agencies like Grey and McCann, then spent long stretches of time at DDB and Ogilvy (where he met Lee).

Those first years were great fun, but after that, he had a disappointing series of experiences. “Everywhere I went from Ogilvy on,” he recalls, “it was always one year after a major acquisition by a holding company.” The environments were stifling. He spent the late 2000s bouncing around a few different agencies, landing at G2. Then, in April 2011, G2 let him go.

So Semons went to see an advertising recruiter, well known in the business–“she’s kind of like a Mama Rose type from Gypsy,” he says. But as the meeting wore on, Mama Rose said something frustrating.

“‘This is the way it’ll go,’” he recalls her saying. “‘I’ll find you a $300,000-$350,000 a year job, but you’ll be in a meeting and you’ll say something someone doesn’t like. And they’ll be looking to cut costs later, someone will remember what you said, and you’re gonna be calling me again.’”

“I was pissed off,” Semons recalls of the meeting. “I was like, ‘Are you telling me, at this point in my career, when I’ve done some of the greatest work, and my skills are so good…that I’m kind of washed up?’” He fumed as he walked away from the meeting. Is she telling me old people have no place in this business? He thought. I just don’t believe that!

Meanwhile, recalls Lee, he kept hearing the same thing again at again at agencies. “You’re not a digital native,” people told him.

Semons chimes in: “That was secret code for saying, ‘You’re old.’” Both felt a new techno-rhetoric had come to serve as a fig leaf for ageism.

It took another year or so for the idea of forming their own shop to fully coalesce.

Semons, Lee, McClabb, and a fourth adman named Joe Dessi would regularly go out to eat at an Italian restaurant in the Flatiron called SD26. The gang reached out to former contacts, and soon they had a lead: One former client had become the senior marketing director at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The woman had been tasked with sourcing a “brand film,” a seemingly small job.

Semons went in to speak with the marketing director about this brand film. Well, asked Semons, what does your brand stand for? The marketing director couldn’t answer succinctly. Soon, she gave Semons and the others access to the entire C-suite of the organization, where they conducted in-depth interviews and learned precisely what the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society did.

“Before you knew it, we had put together a really solid pitch, with a creative manifesto and everything else,” recalls Semons. “This ‘give us a brand film’ assignment became an agency-of-record assignment.” They wound up redesigning the website, making print, TV, and radio campaigns. And without middle management picking apart their ideas, they worked fast, too.

“The work swept through the entire company,” says Lee. “Donations went up by 50%,” says Semons.

Their new agency had to have a name. They called it Interplanetary.

Interplanetary has grown over its four years of existence (a fifth partner, Chris Parker, works remotely from Idaho), but remains a small agency. It has had just six clients to date, and currently only four active ones. Lee and Semons say that after years at big agencies hunting big game, they prefer working with modestly sized clients. “When you work with clients” of a smaller size, says Semons, “you work with them as if you’re on their staff. You have access to the whole C-suite. It becomes a richer, more integrated experience.”

Interplanetary did “around $5 million” in revenue last year, says Semons. “None of us are making the big, huge salaries we were making at the big shops, but we’re keeping the lights on quite nicely,” he says. (They have around 25 people in their employ, mostly consultants on contract.) They aim to double in size, “but none of us ever want to get so big that we can’t be as involved in doing the work as we actually are. What we love to do is make ads. We love the business of advertising. I don’t think any of us want to get so big that we can’t do that anymore.”

The partners have at last put together a new phase to their career where they’re rewarded again for the quality of their work. And they don’t have to constantly be looking over their shoulders. Lee says in his executive creative director jobs from his past, he got so used to thinking, “Where’s the knife gonna come from today?” that he didn’t even notice that it was the first thought that filled his mind when he woke up.

Now that he’s a partner in his own shop, that worry has gone away. “I do not think about it anymore,” he says peacefully. “I think about work, or I think about what I think about.”