Team Player to Team Builder: Victoria Glammer’s Leadership Evolution

Deerfield Group’s Victoria Glammer learned about team dynamics while playing volleyball throughout high school and college. She broadened her knowledge base as an advertising major and a business studies minor at Temple University. She picked up plenty of industry- and channel-specific experience during her first professional forays at MayoSeitz Media and Publicis Health Media, and continues to evolve those skills as senior director, media, at Deerfield. But she believes a crucial part of her education came while spending eight years as a bartender at P.J. Whelihan’s in Blue Bell, Pa.

“You have to be excellent at time-management. You have to juggle various tasks at once. You have to be able to defuse situations while remaining cool and calm. And you have to do it with a smile on your face,” she explains. “Bartending taught me all about teamwork and communication. Everyone should work in a restaurant at some point in their life.”

There was an additional benefit to the gig, Glammer adds with a laugh. “The cash was nice. I didn’t go to an ATM for a long time.”

Now, as a foundational member of Deerfield’s media team, Glammer handles a wide range of strategic and tactical media assignments on behalf of agency mainstays like Novocure and Aytu BioPharma. She’s widely regarded as an ascending leader, scoring one of 25 spots in an internal program designed to develop leadership and problem-solving skills.

“I have a real say in how this department has been developed and how it operates. I have a say in setting up the structure and asking for the resources we need to do this right,” she notes. “It’s an incredible privilege. I don’t take any of that for granted.”

Seeing the full picture

Growing up as a volleyball player and Philly sports nut in the suburbs of the city, Glammer initially had designs on a career in sports media. She realized early on, however, that this would likely require her to hone her craft in markets far away from home.

“I’m first and foremost a family person. There’s no way I can be too far from them for too long,” she says.

Glammer met her husband in high school and their relationship endured a trans-Pacific separation when the Marine Corps deployed him to Okinawa for two years (he received his orders the day after they became engaged). “You make it work, right?” she says. They married shortly after his return and recently welcomed their first child.

During her junior year at Temple, Glammer started interning at MayoSeitz, a consumer-focused media firm that, coincidentally, now shares a Conshohocken, Pa., corporate campus with Deerfield. Upon graduation, the agency extended a full-time position as a media assistant; after a year and change, she was promoted to integrated media planner. Though Glammer worked on a handful of health-related accounts, including Penn Medicine and Lancaster Health, her MayoSeitz tenure was most notable for the wide range of tasks she managed.

“I did media buying, strategy, finance, different channels… Because the company was small, it allowed me to be exposed to so much. I got to see the full picture really early in my career,” she recalls.

Glammer left MayoSeitz for Publicis Health Media in mid-2021 and almost immediately found herself working on the high-profile launch of the Biogen/Eisai Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm. When Biogen discontinued manufacturing the drug, Glammer shifted over to the rare-disease space and Biogen’s spinal muscular atrophy treatment Spinraza. It was this assignment that clarified her sense of professional purpose.

Glammer’s father died when she was 13, which fueled both a passion for health and a keen need to take care of the people around her. Working on the Spinraza business, she found inspiration in the resilience of people with SMA.

“They are so passionate about their lives and their care,” she says. “When you’re able-bodied and healthy, it’s incredibly humbling to see people in that kind of health situation have such a positive outlook.”

When Publicis Group won the Pfizer media business in mid-2023 after a ballyhooed consolidation derby, it set up a distinct agency, CoLab, to handle much of the new work. Glammer was shifted over to the new unit shortly thereafter, but found the startup-like culture an inexact fit for her. 

“I was used to having a direct line of communication with clients. The way the account was structured, I didn’t have that anymore,” she says.

An early test

Glammer left Publicis for Deerfield in early 2024, at a time when the company’s media group was in its infancy. That, in fact, was a primary reason the opportunity appealed to her: She could resume wearing multiple hats and have an impact that vastly belied her short tenure with the organization.

Bill Veltre, a former Bristol Myers Squibb and AbbVie exec who joined Deerfield as EVP, head of media, two months after Glammer’s arrival, says the company’s early trust in her was well-placed.

“She has this inner drive around wanting to help people,” he says. “You put that together with being able to handle massive amounts of work and attention to detail and an ability to listen to the client and respond so thoughtfully, and you’ve got someone who performs far beyond her years.”

Glammer found herself immediately tested. In her first week on the job, she was handed a just-won piece of business – for Incyte’s eczema and nonsegmental vitiligo treatment Opzelura – and asked to transition it from the company’s previous media agency. In addition to reimagining the brand’s media strategy, Glammer had to simultaneously build out a team.

As harrowing as it might have been at the time, she credits this experience with having bolstered her confidence as a leader. The results weren’t half-bad, either: Veltre reports the media re-focus paired with rep activity prompted a 10x surge in scripts.

“At Deerfield, you get opportunities like that. At other places, you might wait years and years before it’s your turn,” Glammer says.

The media team sat at around 10 people when Glammer joined the company. Today, it’s 35 strong and set to expand (“tell everyone we’re hiring,” she cracks). Glammer has every expectation of playing a big role in the continued growth of the function.

“A lot of the big media players in this space are specific to media, but we have access to so many other departments and capabilities within the company,” she explains, adding that the Deerfield media group itself boasts an uncommon diversity of expertise. “We have pillars – our platforms pillar, our ad-ops pillar, our performance-marketing pillar – and we pride ourselves on not being siloed into a specific media capability.”

In the months and years ahead, Veltre expects to see Glammer presenting or serving as a panelist at more industry events, as well as becoming a go-to guest on health- and media-related podcasts. “She’s going to be a media lead somewhere, probably soon,” he predicts.

For her part, Glammer declines to speculate about her professional trajectory. “What I thought I’d be doing is so different from the way things played out,” she says. “Wherever it leads me down the road, whether here or on the client side, we’ll see. Right now I’m just soaking it all in.”

This profile is part of the solli Elevate series, celebrating the Next Generation of Pharma Media Leaders. View all profiles here.