Marissa Ori
VP, Creative Director
AbelsonTaylor
A Powerful Wordsmith
Marissa Ori is the first VP-level creative director to have started her AbelsonTaylor career as a Clinical Research Associate (CRA), aiding with such tasks as reviewing clinical data to verify what can and cannot be said in the agency’s work. She is also the first woman with a copy background to become a creative director at AbelsonTaylor. These firsts are significant because they show what distinguishes Marissa as a great creative director. She’s a word person with a passion for science and a gifted storyteller with the rare ability to present medical information in a way that reaches audiences on a deeply personal and emotional level.
One of Marissa’s proudest achievements at AbelsonTaylor was her work on Teva Oncology’s “In a Word” campaign, which showed—literally and figuratively—that cancer patients are more than the disease they are fighting. Visually revealing the people and relationships contained within common words associated with cancer, e.g., the parent in “CheMOTHERapy” and sibling in “MetastaSIS,” the unbranded campaign successfully differentiated Teva Oncology and won numerous creative awards.
A more recent example of Marissa’s ability to convey just the right message in a meaningful way is the “Not A Clinical Trial” campaign for Allergan Eye. The goal of this disease-state campaign was to prepare the market for launch of a new treatment for wet AMD that would be the fourth to market. Like the others, it was administered by injection into the eye. Unlike the others, the Allergan product could be administered less frequently. Research showed that patients hated the monthly injections required by existing treatments. Physicians responded by often stretching out the intervals between treatments, which led to reduced efficacy compared with clinical trial results. So, Marissa and her team deftly framed the need for a treatment that could be administered at longer dosing intervals and produce efficacy consistent with clinical trial results.
Now Marissa leads the AbelsonTaylor CRA program—the same program that gave her the entre to her career. She provides mentoring and opportunities like those that enabled her own rise at AbelsonTaylor, keeping an eye out for promising writers and the next generation of creative directors.
