Q&A with Fingerpaint’s Bill McEllen

Med Ad News had a chat with Fingerpaint partner Bill McEllen, who has been named lead of all advertising offices for the full-service health and wellness marketing agency, which has five offices across the United States. McEllen, who came to Fingerpaint in 2016 as head of the Saratoga Springs, N.Y. office, talked about how the agency has worked and grown throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and what he envisions as future growth.

Med Ad News: So how did you go from running the Saratoga office to all of the Fingerpaint offices?

Bill McEllen: It was stepwise, I had been managing the New Jersey office as well. We had opened that one up a couple of years ago, and it’s been a great success. And it was a great opportunity to grab up a lot of talented people who are near and dear to my heart from prior lives! And as you guys have seen, we’re growing like crazy. So really, it was a natural next step for me to lead and grow the ad groups as we continue to lead, grow, and evolve who Fingerpaint is.

Med Ad News: Where do you want to take Fingerpaint?

Bill McEllen: I’ve been really fortunate to see the evolution of Fingerpaint over the five years that I’ve been here, and how we’ve changed. For me, it’s a combination of continuing the incredible growth that we’re having, with first and foremost, keeping what makes Fingerpaint, Fingerpaint. I came here because this place is a special place and with growth and change, you always have to make sure that you’re staying true to who you are, that’s your roots. And the idea of us being people first and creating a culture where the best people want to come to do their best work, is always first and foremost.

Med Ad News: You’ve spent the past year as many people have, working from home. What will happen when COVID vaccines are fully rolled up, do you think Fingerpainters will be going back to the office?

Bill McEllen: It’s been almost a year at this point, hasn’t it? I remember, I was in the Saratoga office that day, I rang the bell and had everyone come around and hear what was going on, and that time, haha, we were just going to go home for two weeks and then we’re all coming back…I look at our work space differently I can’t imagine anyone is looking at it the same as it used to be. We always had remote work, we always had a flexible work schedule, but COVID has shown us so many things. One, it’s reframed, for me, our physical space. I look at it as a tool as I look at our laptops or our cell phone. It’s an opportunity for you, if you need or want to come to the office. There are some people who are itching to get back, who can’t wait. And there are some folks who are like, “Hey, this is great! I’m more productive than ever, I don’t have a commute, I can get things done. I’m enjoying more quality time at home.” I don’t see us going back to the way we were. I see that like everyone else, we’re evolving into a new form. I don’t see us getting away from physical locations, we’ll always have a landing spot for people if they need or want to use it. But we’ve always been flexible. Part of Fingerpaint being “people first” is we were flexible in how we handled it.   

Med Ad News: What are other things you’d like to see Fingerpaint achieving in the future?

Bill McEllen: So we go back to the theme, “Things are changing dramatically.” From both the theme of what does the agency of the future look like and the types of talent, and also what do our clients want and need. A lot of this stuff I would say was in play but has been accelerated dramatically through the last year. So think about coming out of this – whenever we come out of this, and I don’t think we’ll ever be fully out of this, we’ll just be in the next phase of it – our clients are looking at ways that are different in how they communicate. How they communicate through sales forces, communicate directly to physicians. I don’t see the sales representative going away, anymore than I see a physical location going away. I see it being used much different. And the things that we’ve invested in as a company beforehand, because industry was going there – what has happened in the past year is that it’s forced innovation in a much faster way. So the idea of using data in a more robust way, through your sales force, we’ve talked about what we’ve done through our omnichannel approach to marketing. And our Shift Performance Center of Excellence Actionable Intelligence Engine is a way we can better inform a sales representative whether they’re having a conversation online or in the hallway of a physician’s office at some point, or if we’re getting directly to a patient, a caregiver, or a physician, in support of, or in followup, to a sales rep.  

I started as a sales rep, and it was a million years ago, I get it, but a sales rep spends a lot of “windshield time,” which isn’t as productive. Now I feel like, for someone who really doesn’t like to sit too much during the day, I find myself sitting in front of a screen more than I ever thought I would.

Med Ad News: How has the all-virtual environment affected your work flow? It used to be for a big pitch, everyone would be on hand in the office and then the selected team would often have to hope a plane to pitch at the client’s office. How has that changed?

Bill McEllen: Fortunately we are all creatives at heart, it was really interesting to see how everyone got into that. Whether it was using Zoom or using Mural as a platform to do a workshop, a lot of the things that were so engrained, “This is how we do things!”, we had to take a step back and look completely differently at. Any pitch, any relationship is one based on the connection, and creating a connection over Zoom or any platform was hard at first. And definitely hard if cameras weren’t on.

Internally, it was really easy when we first started, it was, “Here’s the deal, cameras are always on. I don’t care if your kid’s in the background, or the dog is running around, or it’s messy.” In an interesting way, we got to know people more, and in different ways, than we had actually seeing someone in person, because you got to experience who they were. I’ve gotten to know more people’s families and their kids than I ever had a chance to in the office. Sometimes people would stop by, or I’d see them outside of the office. Now it’s much more commonplace.

I have a ton of empathy for people with younger children at home. I’m fortunate, my kids are in high school and college, it’s a different learning experience. They’re almost self-taught at this point. But it’s hard, when you’re managing a difficult industry or job. Regardless of where you work, our industry is not for the faint of heart, and doing it when everything collided at the same time, was a challenge. Honestly, I am glad I was at Fingerpaint for that. For the reasons I came here – let’s be people first, and let’s do this in a sane and rational way – there was less stress involved, in what was inherently a stressful situation.

Med Ad News: What will be coming up in 2021 and 2022 for Fingerpaint, especially since the agency has grown through the pandemic?

Bill McEllen; Growth is always at the top of the list. When I think about growth, and defining what that growth looks like, that has evolved over time as well. So there’s growth in making sure that we’re online connecting with the right clients, and the clients that are a great cultural fit for us. There’s the growth in making sure that in a people-based business, we have the right talent coming into the organization. We’ve got growth in taking a step back and saying, “What are our clients asking us for that we need to bolster in our offerings?” Last year was 1798 from a market access perspective, and we invested internally in our data solutions. As we continue to go forward, it’s looking for those types of opportunities, where we’re either building something internally because we know it’s what our clients need, as we come through a new way to commercialize brands. Or, there’s a like-minded organization who delivers on something that we’re not delivering on for our clients right now, that we want to bring up under the Fingerpaint umbrella.

Med Ad News: What are the things clients are demanding of you now, and what do you think they will demand in the future?

Bill McEllen: The conversations with our clients now really get to, “Please be our thought partner in reimagining what the future is going to look like,” because it’s a necessity at this point. We’ve lived a year of this, and we’ve learned a ton. We’ve learned some things have worked really, really well, and some things that we need to pivot on. But if I think about what our clients are asking us for, it is getting to much more of a consultative role. Part of it is where the brands are in their life cycle. We’re very used to that model, when you’ve got a product in Phase II or Phase III, and you’ve got a launch coming up. But you don’t have a sales force meeting that you’re planning for. Now it’s how do we do this, regardless of where the brand is in its life cycle, how do we really imagine what’s going on, how do we take all of the data that we have. And some of it, we – agencies and our clients – were not using to its fullest. We’ve talked Big Data for a long time, putting all of that data into action has really accelerated. So things our clients are looking for is, how do we continue to do what we’re doing, how do we get important healthcare information to the people who need it, whether that’s the physician who’s prescribing the product or a learned intermediary who is delivering that information down through a caregiver or a patient. Now, how do we do that in a different way, because we’ve been forced to do it in a different way.