Reid Connolly entered advertising before most people enter a major. In high school, he joined a small branding shop and learned the trade in its least glamorous, most useful form: by doing several jobs because several jobs needed doing. There was no grand theory yet, only the discovery that he had an instinct for marketing and liked the work enough to keep following it.
That early apprenticeship became a quiet pattern. Connolly would spend his career moving between the small and the large, the specialist and the integrated, the technical system and the untidy person at the other end of it. He studied marketing and philosophy at Saint Joseph's University, a pairing almost suspiciously well suited to advertising. One subject asks what people choose. The other asks why.
Leadership roles at Saatchi & Saatchi Healthcare, imc2 and Digitas Health followed. Then, in 2006, he founded Evoke. The new agency began digital-first, when that phrase still marked a position rather than an obligation. Its premise was behavioral: use technology and insight to understand how people actually move through information, then make communication fit that reality.
Digital was the beginning, not the border
Five years in, clients were asking Evoke to take on work beyond the screen. Connolly explained the change with a line that managed to be both positioning statement and operating plan: “We like to think of ourselves as a full-service healthcare agency with a digital heritage.” The distinction mattered. Digital had taught the agency to look closely at audiences, but it did not require the agency to remain in a digital box.
Evoke expanded because clients who trusted its understanding of consumers wanted that understanding carried into broader assignments. By 2011, the team had grown by 50 percent in a year and collected more than ten account wins. Connolly was already cautious about the temptations of size. A medium-sized agency, he said, could not hide people who did not fit. His prescription was neither dramatic nor fashionable: be picky, grow carefully, take the time to do it right.
His preferences in hiring reached back to the small agency where he started. Connolly liked people who had experienced both ends of the business: the resources and rigor of a large firm, plus the improvisation required when nobody can toss a problem across three departments. It was a founder's answer to specialization. Expertise mattered, but so did range. An agency could add disciplines without teaching its people to retreat inside them.
He applied a similarly exacting standard to clients. Connolly objected to the word “vendor” because it encouraged a one-way relationship and, in his view, vendor-like work. A strategic partnership demanded effort from both sides. The thought is conventional now, printed on countless pitch decks. In a young agency choosing where to place limited time, it had teeth. Saying yes to growth also meant deciding which kinds of growth could improve the work rather than merely enlarge the invoice.
“We’ll continue to take our time and do it right.”Reid Connolly, on growth in 2011
There is an attractive tension in those years. Connolly spoke about selection while chasing growth, about human connection while building through technology. The contradictions were productive. Healthcare advertising could not be purely transactional, he argued, because its audience often arrived at consequential moments. Research therefore needed to get beneath a generic “customer need” and closer to how people felt.
His own management style was similarly close to the work. A profile from the period caught him answering client messages at midnight and negotiating a contract during last-minute Christmas shopping. Colleagues described a leader willing to work beside the team late into the evening. This is not evidence of a restful calendar. It is evidence of proximity, and of a founder who had not yet discovered a safe distance from the machinery.
The org chart becomes the assignment
Success added specialists. Specialists added names. Soon the buyer who wanted consumer marketing, professional marketing, public relations, media and market access could encounter several excellent firms under one roof, followed by several explanations of the roof. Connolly saw the friction. Clients were consolidating their agency rosters, while the work itself was becoming more connected. The collection had to behave like a company.
In 2018, multiple agency identities were brought under the Evoke name. At the time, the business counted more than 550 people in eight offices around the world. Connolly called convergence and connectivity a common thread in its history and future. Even the new mark carried the argument: the humanity of a circle meeting the engineering of a square. It was a handsome way to draw an operational headache.
From shop to system / selected milestones
Reported workforce snapshots are shown for context, not as a continuous headcount series.
The larger integration arrived in 2022, after Evoke and Ashfield Health came under common ownership. Twelve creative and public-relations agencies were brought together. The combined operation was reported at more than 1,400 people and $300 million in revenue, with Connolly remaining chief executive. A founder who had built a specialist now had to make a federation intelligible.
This is the less photographed part of entrepreneurship. Starting something rewards definition. Scaling it rewards addition. Integrating it rewards subtraction: fewer seams, fewer names, fewer moments when a client must work out which door to use. The product is not merely the range of capabilities. It is the ease with which those capabilities meet.
Evoke begins as a digital-first healthcare agency.
Five years in, the firm broadens its offer and Connolly joins the PharmaVOICE 100.
Specialist brands align around a single Evoke identity.
Former Ashfield Health agencies integrate with Evoke at global scale.
Inizio Evoke reaches number 9 in the MM+M Agency 100.
Serious work, unserious selves
Connolly's most revealing maxim is also his least corporate: “We take our work seriously, we don't take ourselves seriously.” It survived because it solved a real problem. Advertising can be exhausting, and healthcare adds scientific, legal and emotional weight. A culture without levity becomes brittle. A culture with nothing but levity becomes an improv troupe with invoices.
He has described himself as intense and affable. Former colleagues added a quirky sense of humor and a willingness to get into the trenches. They also emphasized mentorship. Connolly credited leaders who let him try responsibilities before he was entirely ready, then tried to extend the same license to others. Opportunity, in this model, arrives a little before confidence. That is how people grow into a job rather than merely occupy it.
His extracurricular biography supplies an apt metaphor. Connolly played rugby at university and later in the United States, England, Ireland and Northern Ireland. A scrum looks like disorder until one notices that every body has a position and the force only works collectively. He once named industrial design as the career he might have chosen instead. In a way, agency building gave him the same material: systems, pressure, utility and human behavior, only with more conference calls.
Rugby also corrects the usual founder portrait. Business profiles prefer the lone visionary gazing through glass. Rugby offers no useful role for one. Progress comes from coordinated pressure, trust and the unglamorous certainty that somebody else will hold their position. Connolly's language around Evoke has consistently favored the team over the soloist: talent begets talent; people must be given room to grow; broad capability matters only when specialists genuinely work together.
Recognition accumulated along the way. PharmaVOICE named him among its 100 most inspiring people in life sciences in 2011 and again in 2014. PRWeek placed him on its Health Influencer 30 in 2023. In 2025, Inizio Evoke ranked ninth on the MM+M Agency 100, its third straight year in the top ten. Connolly used the occasion to talk about teams and clients, then framed the next era as a convergence of data, creativity and purpose.
What stays when everything changes
The vocabulary has updated. Digital became omnichannel. Analytics became intelligence. The agency became a platform, and Evoke became Inizio Evoke. Yet Connolly's public argument has been remarkably stable. Understand behavior. Connect expertise. Build around people. Use technology as an instrument, not a personality.
The current version of that argument places data beside creativity rather than above it. Inizio Evoke presents brand work, communications, transformation, access and media as connected services. Connolly's recent comments add intelligence-led solutions and human-first leadership to the mix. The labels are contemporary. The logic is recognizably the same one he used when Evoke was young: information earns its keep when it helps people make better decisions, and a capability becomes valuable when clients can use it without navigating the company that produced it.
There is no clean ending to a founder's story while the founder still runs the place. The useful conclusion is a pattern. Connolly started at a tiny shop where he learned by wearing several hats. He built a specialist that became full service because clients asked it to carry its insight farther. He assembled scale, then confronted scale's tendency to fragment. Each stage presented a different version of the same question: how do you make complicated work feel coherent to the person receiving it?
Twenty years after Evoke's founding, the answer is still under construction. It probably should be. Human behavior does not hold still long enough for a final diagram. The circle keeps meeting the square.