Deerfield Group Debuts New ‘Built for This’ Agency Model
The growth plan includes several new hires and role expansions.
Amid the Fierce Pharma Week 2026 conference in Philadelphia, Deerfield Group on Tuesday unveiled a new plan to grow and strengthen the media, marketing and comms agency.
According to this week’s announcement, the “Built for This” model is centered around the concept of pairing high-level leadership and experience with the scale and advanced technologies needed to proactively address industry challenges.
To that end, the growth plan includes multiple forms of executive expansion. For one, Deerfield has brought two new leaders aboard: Brian Rocks, an alum of Heartbeat, Digitas Health and Publicis Health, as chief financial officer and Shelby Rauen, who previously spent time at AREA 23 and Eversana, as head of strategy.
Meanwhile, the agency has also expanded the roles of several existing executives—including Dominic Viola, chief innovation officer; Tim Frank, chief marketing officer; and Amanda Sellers, chief communications officer—to bulk up innovation and connectivity across the company.
“Deerfield is an agency on the move. We have challenged the status quo from the beginning and are constantly evolving to anticipate and meet our clients’ changing needs,” Deerfield CEO Frank Burrell said in the announcement. “We have always led with innovation, but our core has always been, and always will be, our people. As technology becomes a commodity across the industry, senior-level judgment, experience, and relationships are what set the agency apart.”
As part of the new growth strategy, Deerfield said it will use Fierce Pharma Week to speak with clients about the major pain points currently plaguing them, with the results to feed into an “Industry Pain Benchmark” report later this year.
solli’s Final Thoughts
As AI and advanced technology become standard agency capabilities in health and pharma media, differentiation will increasingly come from how effectively those tools are paired with less tangible qualities like senior strategic judgment and trusted client relationships.
In that vein, agencies are also seeking to prove that innovation can translate into faster execution, smoother collaboration and stronger returns—not simply more technology. With advanced AI tools now table stakes in pharma media, the most successful agencies will be those that shape their work around using these tools to actually solve their clients’ pain points.
