Peloton Advantage: one brand fit for the future

Carolyn Clark (Co-founder and President, Peloton Advantage) and Michael McLaughlin (Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Peloton Advantage), take 10 minutes out to discuss the recent merger with OPEN Health.

1. Tell us a little about the history of Peloton Advantage.

We previously both worked for Cardinal Health and left our senior positions 14 years ago to start Peloton Advantage and pursue our direction of scientific publication planning and content development. When we left Cardinal Health we were able to negotiate a positive separation that allowed us to start our business with some talented people and existing accounts that transitioned over to Peloton Advantage. We were progressively able to grow the business year over year by adding one great person after another and bringing on new accounts. Our priority was to treat each one as our most important account, and make sure every project represented our best work.

2. What is your core expertise?

In a nutshell: strategic publication planning and content development, within the medical affairs space.

3. What do clients say about you?

Overall, they see us as an extension of their team; they recognise the expertise that our teams bring to them and their work. We provide great continuity to our clients as we have low turnover of staff and low turnover on the accounts. Therefore, we end up being an important factor in the consistency of the brand’s communications over time; we become experts on the data sources and develop a deep understanding of the strategy for the brands that we support. We recently surveyed 38 clients assessing scientific expertise, quality, timeliness, compliance, and responsiveness; and as you can see in the infographic below, the results were overwhelmingly positive.

4. What are your people like?

Most importantly they are team players; everyone’s very collaborative both internally and with our clients. They have a tremendous amount of expertise and impressive dedication to their work. That comes through in everything they do.

5. Why is a merger with OPEN Health interesting?

One thing that’s been really important for the business ever since we started is its culture. We have really great people working for Peloton Advantage, and to find a partner through this merger that values its people as much as we do was the number one priority. From a business standpoint it really ticks all the boxes. We have grown in the US every year but occasionally ran into challenges with some clients viewing us as only a US-focused medical communications company. Now that we have merged with OPEN Health Medical Communications, together we have a global organisation that can support clients across the world, which is very interesting and exciting. In addition, we can now tap into the expertise of the PBC and OPEN VIE practices, which enhances our ability to address some of the additional requests that we get from our clients.

6. What benefits will it bring for clients and for your people?

Overnight we have become a true global provider, which is really important for our clients. In many ways the medical communications group within OPEN Health and the group within Peloton Advantage work on very similar types of projects, but we have strengths in areas that complement each other well. Together we can offer more complete service options to our clients. Additional benefits such as the increased strength of our combined creative and digital teams will help to provide our clients with more innovative solutions for the challenges they face.

7. What other exciting things are going on over the next year?

We announced the merger at the end of 2018 and have been busy integrating the business since then. In February 2019 we re-launched the brand and there was a lot of excitement across the organisation to see the direction that Peloton is heading. Now we are in the process of bringing that message to our clients, either on an individual basis or at industry conferences — we had a team that attended MAPS (March, New Orleans) and we have ISMPP coming up in April. Not only are we launching the new brand at ISMPP 2019, but we are also bringing in some of our colleagues from Chicago and the UK. In addition, now that we have the opportunity to work with the OPEN Health Medical Communications team in Chicago, we can create a stronger footprint within the US, enabling us to support more US-based clients as well as our global clients.

Get in touch

For more information contact: Carolyn Clark, Co-founder and President, Peloton Advantage CClark@pelotonadvantage.com +1 973 582 5701 Michael McLaughlin, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Peloton Advantage mmclaughlin@pelotonadvantage.com +1 973 582 5702