Lisa Talbot
Managing Director Healthcare Strategy and Business Development
Marina Maher Communications (MMC) and RXMOSAIC Health
The New Ideas Only Specialist
Mark Twain wrote, “there is no such thing as a new idea.” After more than 20 years in healthcare communications, Lisa Talbot would beg to differ.
During her tenure at MMC, Lisa has won the vast majority of new business pitches, necessitating over 40 new hires to staff the business won. To get to that elusive “new idea” to win pitches and drive business growth for the agency and its clients, Lisa interrogates the primary and secondary research from both an emotional and intellectual perspective and spends hours speaking with communities and stakeholders. She has the uncanny ability to go beyond the obvious and read between the lines to spot unmet needs and unique connections between target audiences.
For example, Lisa and her team developed a surprising strategy for a new transformative rare disease treatment. Since she is a mother of a child with a rare disease and a practitioner who has worked in this field for decades, Lisa knew rare diseases are rife with emotions and their communities are some of the most supportive. In talking to the community about this product, she heard unexpected hesitation. She decided to look beyond the treatment’s functional benefits, no matter how impressive it sounded, and focus instead on the emotional ties and loyalty patients had to their allied healthcare professionals—a relationship that she believed could stop patients from getting to this therapy. Her unorthodox strategic thinking so impressed the client, they awarded the business immediately.
Throughout her career, Lisa has worked across nearly every therapeutic category on some of the most transformational brands in oncology, rare disease, and multiple sclerosis. Over the last several years as a senior leader at MMC, Lisa has also used the new business process to help the agency transform itself into a fully integrated model. She has successfully deployed creatives, strategists, and digital and data specialists who work collaboratively to get to that “new idea.” This model, viewed by clients as the future direction of PR, has given MMC a competitive advantage and propelled remarkable growth.
