In the third instalment of Having a Crack, Simon Davies unpacks how spotting a gap in pharmaceutical advertising, and committing fully to it, became the making of his agency.
Most businesses try to serve everyone. And most businesses are average at all of it.
I made a different decision. I went deep into one industry and stayed there. And it was one of the best calls I ever made.
It wasn’t a grand strategic plan. It started with listening and being open to opportunity.
In 2009 I was studying a Master of Business Administration at Monash University. One of my classmates was Mike — a Brand Manager at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. We got talking. I started learning about his world. And what I noticed immediately was an opportunity.
Every pharmaceutical agency in Australia led with science. Data. Clinical trials. Mechanism of action. Efficacy rates. And look — the science matters. It’s non-negotiable in a regulated industry. But I’d come from consumer advertising where one rule applied above everything else: people buy on emotion. Always.
Doctors are human beings. They have the same emotional wiring as everyone else. They respond to fear, hope, ambition, the desire to do right by their patients. They buy on emotion too. They just need the science to back it up.
That was the lightbulb moment. What if you could build an agency that truly understood both worlds? One that could speak the language of science fluently, but wrap it in the emotional intelligence of great consumer advertising? Nobody was doing it that back then.
Our positioning was born: Where Science and Emotion Collides.
It wasn’t just a tagline. It was a genuine philosophy that shaped every brief we took on, every campaign we created, every hire we made. We used music (our favourite song was Fix You – by Cold Play…. very relevant in the pharmaceutical industry) to unlock emotion in ways pharmaceutical advertising had never seen. We wrote poems for pitches. We created videos that were more like short films than marketing materials. Our internal goal — said with a smile but meant sincerely — was to make our clients cry. Not the patients. The brand managers. When a marketer teared up watching our work, we knew we’d nailed it.
But finding the right positioning is only half the story. You also need to choose a niche with genuine tailwinds behind it. And healthcare had them in abundance.
Healthcare represents ten percent of Australian GDP. Think about that for a moment — one dollar in every ten spent in this country flows through the health sector. It’s government-backed, which means it doesn’t evaporate in a downturn the way discretionary categories do. It’s growing, driven by an ageing population and increasing investment in medical research and innovation. And it’s complex — genuinely complex — which means clients actually value expertise rather than just shopping on price.
You can’t walk into pharmaceutical marketing from consumer advertising and wing it. You need to understand the regulatory environment. You need scientists and medically trained writers. You need people who can read a clinical trial and translate it into something a doctor can connect with. That complexity creates a natural barrier to entry that protects the specialists who commit to the space.
The glamorous industries — consumer goods, fashion, automotive, tech — attract every agency chasing a sexy portfolio. The competition is ferocious and the margins thin. Healthcare advertising isn’t cool. Nobody leans in at a dinner party when you tell them what you do. But the unglamorous industries are often the most profitable ones, because the crowd goes elsewhere. I call it the tax on cool.
We weren’t competing against hundreds of agencies. We were competing against a handful. And because we’d built genuine expertise — because we’d committed completely to the space — our services had a greater value that a generalist could never justify.
The lesson here isn’t just about healthcare. It’s about the framework for choosing a niche.
First — find something you can genuinely become expert in. Not just competent. Expert. The kind of deep, specific knowledge that takes years to build and that clients can feel the difference between.
Second — make sure the market has tailwinds. Is the industry growing? Is there government backing or structural demand that makes it resilient? Are clients willing to pay for expertise or just shopping on price?
Third — look for the gap. In 2012, nobody in Australian healthcare advertising was combining rigorous science with genuine emotional intelligence. That gap was the opportunity. Every niche has one if you look hard enough.
The question I’d ask any business owner or agency leader reading this: what is your niche? Not your category — your specific niche. What problem do you solve for a specific type of client better than anyone else? And is the market you’re in growing, or are you swimming against the current?
If the answer is vague, you don’t have a niche. Get specific. Go deeper than feels comfortable. Find the tailwinds. And own it completely.
Be something for someone, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
