The Agency That Learned to Sit in the Waiting Room

There is a revealing detail in the story of Imre. Its first national client was Home Depot, and founder Dave Imre later said he had pursued one of the retailer's executives with enough determination to call it stalking. The joke works because every small agency has lived some version of it: a cramped beginning, a large prospect and the conviction that one meeting could change the scale of the room.

The meeting did change the room. Imre began in 1993 as one person practicing public relations around Baltimore. By 2005, it had 40 employees, two offices and $6.5 million in annual billings. Its clients included Home Depot, John Deere, MetLife and Travelers. The surprise was not that a PR shop had grown. It was what growth made the shop become.

Clients rarely respect the neat borders on an agency website. A press problem becomes a brand problem; a brand problem becomes a digital problem; the digital problem starts asking for media, social content and measurement. Imre followed that trail from public relations into what its founder once called “360 communications,” and eventually into a full-service agency of record. Today it sells strategy, creative, social, media, omnichannel programs, production, analytics and AI-search visibility. The old agency did publicity. The current one tries to own the entire distance between uncertainty and action.

The moment before yes

Imre's favorite territory is the moment of decision. This can sound like the usual language of an advertising agency until you look at where much of its business sits: severe asthma, oncology, rare disease, eye health, animal health and other categories in which a person is not idly comparing sneakers. Patients are frightened. Caregivers are tired. Physicians are busy and skeptical. The claims are regulated. The cost of being glib is unusually high.

That has given Imre a useful tension. It brings the tempo and cultural antennae of consumer marketing into healthcare, then subjects those instincts to medical and regulatory reality. The work must attract attention without treating illness as entertainment. It must make an evidence-heavy message understandable without sanding off its qualifications. The customer is often two customers at once: the person who may receive a treatment and the professional who may prescribe it.

“The world isn't waiting, and neither are our clients.”Nadine Lafond, Chief Executive Officer

In 2024, work for the severe-asthma medicine TEZSPIRE put that combination on display. Four patients came to New York for two days of filming, producing more than 20 pieces of social content. The campaign also brought the educational creator Ninja Nerd to a major respiratory conference for a resident bootcamp and an in-booth session. The work moved between lived experience, internet-native formats and clinical education. PM360 later named the Amgen, AstraZeneca and Imre group one of its 2025 ELITE marketing teams.

A business built by getting invited back

The agency business is famously addicted to the new-business pitch. Imre's 2022 figures point to a quieter engine. Reported revenue rose from roughly $45 million to $49 million, and about 81 percent of growth came from existing clients. That suggests the firm was expanding inside relationships after the first assignment - adding social to PR, analytics to creative or an entire brand launch to a smaller engagement.

The model is familiar but demanding. Large companies pay through agency-of-record retainers, companion-agency relationships and projects. In exchange, Imre supplies senior strategy and a collection of specialists that would be cumbersome to assemble for each campaign. Public pricing is unavailable, as it is for most custom agency work. The useful economic fact is the mix: PharmaLive reported that brand and promotional work accounted for half of Imre's 2025 services, social made up 22 percent and website and digital work 17 percent. Data, paid media, omnichannel and earned work filled the remainder.

Imre took its first outside investment in 2021, after 28 years without one. RLH Equity Partners bought into a company of more than 220 people; the exact price and valuation stayed private. The money was intended to add talent, analytics, omnichannel skill and medical expertise. This was not merely cash for more of the same. It was a bet that a specialist agency could become broader without becoming generic.

Goodbye clicks, hello conversations

The newest extension is the Imre Conversation Converter. Its premise is sharp: when a patient or physician asks an AI chatbot a health question, the old search-results page may never appear. A brand can rank well in conventional search and still be missing, misunderstood or flattened inside the generated answer. Imre offers an AI Visibility Score and optimization work meant to make the brand's information legible in that new conversation.

This is partly a product and partly a consulting wrapper around machine learning, data analysis and content work. Spring13 helped Imre name and package it, producing the website, brochure, campaign system and launch materials. Under CEO Nadine Lafond, who arrived from Ogilvy Health in December 2025, expanding the platform is a stated priority. Lafond's larger argument is that the old healthcare launch model moves too slowly: agencies must learn from market feedback and adjust while the campaign is alive.

There is a risk in the proposition. AI systems change quickly, their answers are inconsistent and visibility does not guarantee a prescription or a sale. The approach is most defensible for high-consideration categories where people actively research, the information environment is complex and a brand has enough authoritative content to improve. A local shop selling an interchangeable product may gain little from the machinery. Nor can optimization rescue weak evidence, a confused position or a product people do not want.

The culture is part of the machinery

Imre describes itself with five words: empathy, optimism, kindness, innovation and disruption. The first two have endured longest. Its LGBTQ-founded history shows up in Prism, an employee group focused on LGBTQIA+ belonging, alongside a Women's Initiative Network and a BIPOC Collective. Those are internal programs, but they also function as creative infrastructure. An agency asked to portray patients and communities will make expensive mistakes if too few people in the room can recognize a stereotype.

The company now operates from New York, Philadelphia and the Baltimore area, with remote employees spread around the country. It competes with specialist independents such as Klick Health, Real Chemistry and Fingerpaint, plus the giant healthcare networks. Its case for being hired is not scale alone. It is the promise of senior attention, consumer fluency, healthcare depth and enough data to show what happened after the clever line went live.

The most useful thing to copy from Imre is not a slogan about empathy. It is a sequence. Listen closely enough to define a real hesitation. Build a specialty around that hesitation. Add capabilities only when they shorten the distance from insight to action. Then measure whether the action occurred. This works when the decision matters and the client values sustained learning. It works poorly when empathy is decoration, the data arrives too late or every service is merely another box on a pitch slide.

A basement agency wins its first national account by refusing to go away. A mature agency keeps the account by knowing when persistence should give way to listening. Imre's long experiment has been learning the difference.

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