Jay Carter
SVP, Director of Strategy Services
AbelsonTaylor
The Forward Thinker
Prevacid, Neulasta, Aranesp, Actos, Byetta, Rituxan and Herceptin. All of those brands have two things in common. First, they were all highly successful. Second, Jay Carter. For many in the industry, nothing more needs to be said.
You will be hard-pressed to find someone in this industry who hasn’t benefited from Jay’s dedication—“Jay ALWAYS puts his clients ahead of building his agency,” says Bill Campbell, SVP & General Manager, North America, CSL Behring. Or, his intelligence—“Jay leverages his deep scientific knowledge as a pharmacist to bring highly technical, scientific data to life,” according to pharmaceutical executive Laurence Smith. Not to mention, his unique insights—“Even though I left commercial sales and marketing, I still can’t go more than a few months without the need to call Jay for advice,” says Daniel R. Orlando, COO, Vericel.
But for those uninitiated few, let’s take you back to 1996 when oncology was advancing by leaps and bounds with powerful new chemotherapy agents. Neupogen was one of two brands approved to help maintain a patient’s white blood cells count during chemo, but physicians tended to underuse these products.
So Jay, partnering with the marketing staff at Amgen, created Project ChemoInsight, a retrospective chart audit that oncology practices could opt into to help track patients’ doses and treatment goals. This was before EMRs, smartphones and wearables made data collection easy. It required an old-fashioned floppy disk! But Jay recognized the advantage of showing patients how their day-to-day activities could lead to better healthcare decisions. And it worked. Armed with this real-world data, brands like Neupogen became integral components of cancer treatment. And while Jay has countless examples of similar brilliance, this one still resonates with marketers today.
“I often think about this as an example of what great strategy means,” explains Katerina Babinski Steele, Manager of New Business Development, AbelsonTaylor. “Understanding your customer and your market so well that you can pinpoint the market’s needs with the kind of clarity that allows you to find the right solution—even if it is 20 years ahead of its time.”
