Dentsu Health’s Media Lifer

Many people who work in media entered the business almost by accident. Matt Brown counts himself among the proud minority who wanted in from the get-go.

Brown, Dentsu Health’s director, paid search, grew up drawing and painting, and briefly considered pursuing a fine arts degree at Temple University. Even at a young age, however, he understood the long odds against a successful career as an illustrator or painter. “The whole ‘starving artist’ thing scared me a little,” Brown admits.

Instead, he attended Penn State University, where he studied marketing, communications and media studies. After graduation he moved to the Philadelphia area and took a search associate job with digital agency WebiMax. Roles as a search specialist at eBay and paid media associate, senior associate and manager at Netplus followed in turn.

Thus a mere five years after he graduated from college, Brown knew he was a media lifer. “A lot of my colleagues may have stumbled into media because it was different and they saw an opportunity. I feel fortunate that I had the formal training,” he says.

It was at his next stop, at Publicis Health Media as a manager, paid search, where Brown’s media career “kind of went into full speed,” as he puts it. Brown was assigned to the agency’s Johnson & Johnson business, which came with a $100 million-plus per month budget across 10 different brands. As opposed to the smaller brands (with proportionately smaller budgets) he’d been supporting at WebiMax and Netplus, the J&J work afforded him a broad digital canvas upon which to operate.

“Search is a very different beast for reaching patients and HCPs. Having those larger budgets gives you flexibility and the option to try different things,” Brown says.

After two years at PHM, Brown joined CMI Media Group as supervisor, SEM and emerging media. There, he worked on media for Genentech, with similarly robust budgets and freedom to experiment. It also continued his on-the-job education in the nuances of compliance and regulation.

Learning and leading

Brown admits that the MLR process rattled him at first, but says that he has become a true believer in its value. “It requires a lot of back and forth, but once it’s complete you know your campaign is going to be successful,” he explains. “It makes you better. You learn to plan and organize and anticipate anything that could happen along the way.”

That organization and ability to see around corners have since become Brown’s professional calling cards. “He was always a step ahead,” says his former Dentsu Health colleague Demi Morganstein, now director, sales at Swoop. “You’d be looking at client ROI data and somebody would suggest a change—and Matt would already have made the optimization ahead of time.”

When the opportunity to join Dentsu Health presented itself three years ago, Brown was intrigued by the possibility of building a search function from the ground up. While he speaks warmly of his former PHM and CMI teammates, he acknowledges feeling like “a bit of a spoke in the wheel” during his time at both organizations. At Dentsu, by contrast, he’s more confident to lead and innovate.

That stems in large part from the “clean slate” Brown and his fellow founding members of the Dentsu Health media team inherited. The Dentsu mothership has a long legacy of work with health and wellness clients, but a shorter track record with pharma ones. That, in effect, has liberated members of the health media team: They don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done, because there’s no quote-unquote “Dentsu Way” to fall back on.

“We’re not just a pharma agency,” Brown says. “We have capabilities and technology that manage some of the biggest brands on the globe. What we’re doing is taking those capabilities and putting a pharma spin on them.”

Big clients and beyond

Dentsu Health’s media team opened some eyes during the ballyhooed Amgen U.S. media agency business review last year. While the agency didn’t win the business—it finished as the runner-up to IPG Mediabrands—Brown came away from the pitch believing that it’s a matter of when, not if, Dentsu will count a similarly sized pharma company as a client.

“It was the biggest pitch I’ve worked on—it was the biggest pitch any of us worked on, really,” he says. “Even if the end result wasn’t what we wanted, it was a great experience. We’re ready for the next big one.”

Brown is clearly comfortable in the big-agency environment and relishes the opportunity to work alongside his Dentsu peers in other verticals. Over the course of his three years at the company, Brown has led sessions during which he educated the broader search team about the nuances of the MLR process. “Matt is a knowledge-sharer and a mentor,” Dentsu Health SVP, health media Brad Fox, says admiringly.

Brown also singles out a handful of Dentsu siblings, including media giant Carat and customer-experience specialist Merkle, as rich sources of information and inspiration. He admits, however, that an in-house media role encompassing everything from search to programmatic strategy might appeal to him somewhere down the road.

“I love, love, love that omnichannel mindset,” he adds.

Outside the office, Brown is an avid trail runner and biker, often with his dog in tow (“it’s such a beautiful dog—you have to ask him for pictures!” Morganstein says with a laugh). He and his wife are expecting their first child in September.

So yeah, Brown has his hands full for now. “There’s never a lack of things to think about, like effectively utilizing paid search in the AI era,” he says, pivoting back to his professional life. “It’s a very cool time to be doing this.”