Natalie McDonald
President and Founder
Create NYC
The Agency Reinventor
In 2009, Natalie McDonald set her sights on building a unique agency model with the purpose of reinventing a new agency option to deliver quality advertising. How did she do it? Through several distinct and innovative strategies that disrupted healthcare advertising as we know it.
“Natalie founded Create NYC to be different,” says Lauren Wetmore, SVP, Director of Client Services, Create NYC. “She didn’t just copy another idea and rebrand. She quite literally developed a new way of working within the advertising industry based on her past experiences. Our process, our staffing, our fee structure—everything was examined and relaunched to be more efficient for our clients.”
Beginning her career at Pfizer and continuing later at a large, traditional AOR agency, Natalie saw changes heralding a new reality where blockbuster brands and huge budgets were no longer the norm and marketers were being challenged to do more with less. So, she imagined a solution to these challenges that could bring new meaning to the word efficiency.
The agency’s defined three core services, Flat-Fee Advertising, Flat-Fee Adaptation, and Short-Term Marketing, focus the company exclusively in the area of execution of advertising. The Create NYC model encourages marketers to decouple their brand strategy and campaign creation from the execution of tactics and pay for advertising deliverables instead of time and materials. Clients can expect top-notch creative with senior level account support in developing core tactics across the marketing plan—all based on a flat-fee rate card.
She also saw the need for important and timely low-complexity changes to already approved tactics. So, she created a model wherein projects that fall into this category, such as product label changes, are funneled through Create NYC’s Flat-Fee Adaptation Service, using its own customized agency process for specific client-provided changes—also based on a flat-fee rate card. Additionally, through Create NYC’s Creator and Marketing Hubs, more than 70 serviced brands are able to tap into more than 350 independent, on-demand creative talents in the Create NYC model.
As Create NYC approaches it’s 10-year anniversary, it has become an industry leader in efficient execution of core healthcare tactics.
