John Mossawir
Head of Marketplace Strategy, Healthcare
Initiative
The Beautiful Mind Behind Marketing Transformation
John Mossawir has been a powerful force operating quietly behind the scenes to help make Initiative into a media agency powerhouse in the pharma space, supporting an extraordinarily successful healthcare portfolio in 2022 that included powerhouse clients such as Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead, and Teva.
During his 22-year tenure at Initiative, John has developed new media and analytics planning tools that have transformed the marketing programs of pharmaceutical companies. He reimagined Initiative’s core planning tool called Ripple to enable addressable media planning for 120 different channels across HCP and DTC. His contributions include creating audience panels of 9,000 patients across all disease states and 3,500 HCPs. His tool helps drive media planning for 125 campaigns a year contributing to billions of dollars in sales for the agency’s pharmaceutical clients.
To address the difficulties of marketing investment calibration prior to FDA approval, John created the “Launch Control” tool, which augments pharmaceutical launch parameters with data and analytics from a normative database of 60+ product launches over the last five years.
While uniquely able to translate complex analytics into clear business opportunities for clients, John has also led formative research that has reshaped how pharma brands approach their digital strategies to engage HCPs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he imagined and designed groundbreaking research to understand how doctor-patient interactions were changing, which ultimately spurred Initiative’s pharma clients to expand their digital media strategies, including endemic and digital conference support, as well as increase their use of Doximity, Medscape, and other social platforms for engaging HCPs.
This shift has endured post-pandemic for Initiative’s pharma clients—and serves as a powerful testament to John’s “beautiful mind” (in his colleague’s words) and extraordinary impact on the pharma marketing space.
