Borderless consumer/healthcare agency Moon Rabbit launches
Moon Rabbit, a borderless advertising agency, has launched, inspired by an ancient myth to “break boundaries for consumer and healthcare brands.” The agency is led by Managing Partners Michael Banner (former managing director with McCann Health Singapore and Concentric), John Tenaglia (NSight and Studio PMG), and James Tinker (McCann Health Singapore). Alejandro Canciobello – a Cannes Lion judge and most recently at Leo Burnett – has joined as creative director.
Michael Banner
Based in California, Singapore, and New York, the agency currently has a staff of 50 and is concentrating in the healthcare and consumer sectors. Its Singapore team has worked with brands such as Netflix, Coca-Cola, Virgin, and Toyota.
Med Ad News has caught up with Banner and Tenaglia to ask them a few questions about the iconic moon rabbit and what a borderless agency can offer clients today.
What is the need, as far as you can determine, for the kind of agency you have created?
For a while, the healthcare universe was somewhat insulated from the rapid explosion of content that we were seeing all around us. The relationship between doctor and patient remained a driving force for most healthcare decisions, and more importantly, for most of the exchange of healthcare information.
That has rapidly changed. With the rise of the informed patient, we have gone over the precipice from the days of the doctor at the center of the healthcare universe to now where the patient sits securely sits at its center. This has opened the healthcare market to a massive influx of content, and with it, an incredibly noisy market. The best way for any brand, in any market, to break through this noise is with creativity, specifically, creating stories and experiences that reach our audience and generate a reaction, a connection.
John Tenaglia
But our audiences for healthcare brands continue to diversify in their backgrounds, life experiences and exposure to the world as a whole. Additionally, our clients’ needs continue to evolve as more tech companies enter the space with non-traditional offerings. Even our professional audiences are rapidly changing as it is no longer wise to treat them as a monolithic segment that thinks about medicine all day, every day.
Like all of us, HCPs are connected to the world at all times and open to a myriad of content subjects at any time of the day. Many healthcare clients, even while recognizing this, continue to silo out expertise: this agency does my HCP, this agency does my consumer, this agency my digital, this agency my social, and so on. We see how networks are all trying to meet these needs by offering clients a one-stop shop built as an amalgamation of several agencies, each with their own profit motives, and as importantly, each with staff that have a like set of experiences.
They call it integration, but in some ways, each agency is pulling in slightly different directions while fighting over their overlapping fringes. We just felt there has to be a better solution for our clients, one where they can hire a single agency that has a staff with a range of work, audience, channel and life experiences. One that accurately reflects the constantly diversifying healthcare audience. One that can deliver richer creative, content and experiences across audiences and channels. We call it borderless creativity.
James Tinker
What distinguishes your agency from other agencies, borderless or not?
It’s our commitment to provide our clients with the right talent mix for their particular challenges. We don’t treat each brand or each market as needing the same type of solutions. For some healthcare markets, we recognize that the solutions, even to the professional audience, require a more consumer-type creative approach and we make sure staff with consumer experience are on that brand’s team. For some, we recognize that the solutions, even for the patient audience, require a more scientific/med-comms approach, and we make sure staff with med comms experience are on that brand’s team.
So far it seems to be working. Clients are appreciating the broader range of creative solutions they are seeing us bring to challenges they might have previously thought required a more traditional solution.
What are your goals for the agency in 2020? What do you envision happening in the next five years?
In 2020, we want to continue to grow with clients who appreciate the value we bring to them and their brands. We recognize that we aren’t for everyone and that’s ok. We want to continue to expand our creative horizons by further diversifying our creative and digital staff. Over the next five years, we will continue to build out our consumer teams in Singapore with a long-term goal of expanding into the consumer space here in the US.
Why Moon Rabbit as a name? Is it the association of the moon rabbit in Chinese legend as creating the elixir of life or medicine for mortals?
We do love the legend of the moon rabbit. What people may not know is that many cultures speak of a rabbit on the moon mixing something, not just the Chinese. And in some ways, that’s the point of borderless, needing to bring all these experiences and perspectives together to tell stories that connect to our incredibly diverse audience.
