Medulla Communications has announced its entry into the United States. Andrew Schirmer will lead the US operations as consulting director. Medulla will concentrate on health tech and consumer health brands, providing full-funnel marketing expertise—from lead generation to long-term brand building. The agency has already been working with US-based health-tech startups from the Mumbai office, driving both digital consumer communication and performance-marketing.

The move comes a few months after the announcement of Medulla’s expansion to Singapore and the launch of their joint venture, Capsule, to create India’s first super-specialist healthcare events agency.

Schirmer said, “The era of health-tech brands and startups having to choose between market understanding and cost-effectiveness is over. Our model brings together the best of both worlds—US-based strategic leadership and India-based creative and digital execution that’s fast, technically sound, and cost-effective."

To know more about the launch and Medulla's future expansion plan, we caught up Praful Akali, founder and MD, Medulla Communications. 

Edited excerpts: 

The launch comes close on the heels of the launch in Singapore. How is the expansion working for the agency?

Singapore has been very interesting because there have been a number of healthcare advertising agencies expanding from the West to the East – thus bringing in Western sensibilities – but there has been no healthcare advertising agency from the East spreading its wings across the APAC markets. It’s taught me that our Indian healthcare advertising sensibilities, emotions, insights, authenticity are at the heart of our success of Medulla so far and will hopefully to continue to drive our success in other markets.

US is the largest healthcare advertising market in the world. Due to the US being a rare market with regulatory allowance of direct-to-consumer communication for pharma brands – of course with clear restrictions – and most global pharma communication being built in the US, it commands a very high share of global healthcare advertising revenues. I’ve always felt that you can only truly call yourself a global healthcare ad agency if you succeed in the US.

So launching is just the very first step – we’ll call ourselves global when we succeed!

While this is the official launch of Medulla in the US - Schirmer has been working around the launch for five months now. What are the initial learnings from setting up an Indian agency in the market?

Beyond these five months, Schirmer has also briefly worked with us during his stint as fractional CMO with a US-based client of ours. So he identified early on that there is a niche for Medulla in the US healthtech start-up industry, which is often forced to focus only on sales-driven marketing rather than shaping the brand for the future, due to budget constraints. His work with us also made it crystal clear that it's not difficult for an agency outside of the US to understand US markets and audiences, if it has the right kind of strengths & expertise. Medulla, being a healthcare super specialist with a strong inclination towards digital marketing, is uniquely poised to fit into this niche. It is, in fact, this early realisation that encouraged Schirmer to join Medulla as consulting director, US.

To kick-start our US business, we intend to target a niche within healthcare advertising – the health-tech and healthcare startup industry. Medulla brings in the rare combination of performance marketing and brand communication that these brands need – first to build business at the 0-1x stage and then to scale the business through brand communication at the x-to-10x stage when start-up brands can afford to invest in mass communication and brand-building. These are often handled by different agencies and this transition then becomes a common point of failure for many healthcare startups.

A year later, if one was to call this expansion into the market a success, what would that entail?

At the end of one year we will still be firming up our roots and client base in the US, but our vision is really long term. The first step over the next three or four years is to be the agency of choice in our chosen niche of health-tech and healthcare startup clients in the US. We believe this alone would ensure Medulla’s annual revenue in the US would exceed that from the Indian market in 2028. Once we achieve that, there is significant room for growth in other more competitive areas of healthcare in the US – especially consumer health, healthcare professional communication, hospitals and healthcare delivery services.

Are you looking at other international markets too?

For now, our current series of expansion announcements culminates with this announcement of our launch to the US. We would wait to generate value from our expansion in the US, APAC, and healthcare experiential services before we expand further. Even within these markets, there is a room to continuously expand services, sub-sectors, clients, sub-markets for over a decade to come.