Dan Landers
Head of Strategy, Health
Initiative
Driving Culturally Relevant Media Strategy
Initiative’s meteoric rise to be named the Ad Age, Adweek, and Festival of Media North America Media Agency of the Year all this year can be attributed in part to the brilliance of the agency’s strategy team. Within the health portfolio, Dan Landers has been a key driver of award-winning campaigns and strategies that are redefining how pharma brands reach their audiences. Since his start in October 2021, Dan’s leadership has been characterized by an ability to see over the horizon as the industry evolves and create media plans that ensure pharma clients remain relevant to their audiences. He has demonstrated that pharma communications can be as bold and culturally relevant as any consumer brand.
With a focus on patient empathy, Dan has uncovered actionable insights about the experiences of people in different therapeutic areas that have translated into innovative media campaigns. Among the insights Dan and his team uncovered were that high-risk Black and Latinx communities prefer the privacy that radio and streaming affords to engage with messages about HIV prevention. This approach informed the creation of the “In the Deep” podcast series that resulted in 48,000 sexual health visits and thousands of HIV tests.
Dan also worked on an industry-defining campaign for a major pharma company to create more inclusive media strategies that reach audiences in need of treatments. He and his team audited more than 40 media plans of the company’s products, determining that the people who were most likely to experience a specific health condition were less likely to see the brand’s messages due to systemic biases in the algorithms that drive media targeting. After Dan’s reengineering, the company’s media plans hit extraordinary levels of higher reach against BIPOC audiences across the company’s portfolio.
In reshaping how major pharma brands approach media planning by ensuring equity and creating cultural relevance, Dan is helping bring life-saving treatments to those most in need.
