In the winter of 1925, a dog named Togo ran farther than the dog that became famous. Balto got the statue. Togo, twelve years old and smaller than a lead dog was supposed to be, covered the longest and most dangerous portion of the relay carrying diphtheria antitoxin toward Nome. The forgotten distance is the part that interested a healthcare communications firm launched eighty-four years later. It named itself TogoRun.
There is an occupational hazard in naming a company after a heroic animal: the metaphor can eat the business. TogoRun has sleds, trails, team members “on the sled,” and an annual Spirit of Togo award. Yet beneath the cheerful vocabulary sits a precise proposition. Healthcare is crowded with consequential facts that are hard to understand, tightly regulated, frightening, or all three. TogoRun finds the detail that makes those facts travel.
The agency that bought itself
TogoRun began in 2009 inside Omnicom, with offices in New York and London and Kathy Hyett as its founding president. Gloria “Glo” Janata, a lawyer turned communications strategist, took over as president in 2012. She had already worked on brands including Viagra, Botox, Zoloft, Celebrex, and Cologuard - products whose stories must make it through lawyers, clinicians, journalists, patients, and regulators without becoming mush.
Then 2020 arrived. During Omnicom's restructuring, Janata was offered the chance to acquire the agency. This was not a founder leaving a garage. It was an operator buying a mature name from a holding company in the middle of a pandemic. More than half the team and nearly all the clients came with her. The terms were not disclosed. The first-year result was: TogoRun reported a 225 percent increase in its client roster and 900 percent revenue growth.
The acquisition changed the incentives. TogoRun became woman-owned and independent, part of Janata's GMJ Global group alongside the digital shop VegaRun, creative practice StudioTogo, and a media unit. The agency could still reach across markets through partners, but it no longer needed a giant network to decide what counted as a good assignment.
What “the untold story” looks like at work
The phrase appears everywhere in TogoRun's language. It risks sounding soft until you examine the work. For Exact Sciences, the difficult subject was colorectal cancer screening. TogoRun helped build The New 50 around Harry and Jill Connick, clinicians, patients, advocacy groups, local events, and the arrival of a noninvasive at-home test. The campaign generated roughly 500 million impressions and 666,000 website visits in seven months. More important, 81 percent of surveyed event attendees said they were very likely to ask a doctor about Cologuard.
For Obagi, the overlooked fact was hiding in the research protocol. The skincare company studied all six Fitzpatrick skin types. TogoRun turned that fact into SKINCLUSION, a global campaign about representation and unconscious bias with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Project Implicit, and the International Cultural Diversity Organization. Its reported numbers were enormous, but the smaller one is more revealing: participation in Project Implicit's online bias tests rose 33 percent in the first week.
For Mission Plasticos, attention had to become capacity. Reshaping Lives: Full Circle offers no-cost breast reconstruction to underserved post-mastectomy patients. TogoRun and StudioTogo built the website, videos, marketing materials, events, and media outreach, including a focus on Hispanic outlets. The campaign generated more than 38 million impressions and recruited more than 100 volunteer surgeons. A person could read about it, volunteer for it, or receive care from it. The story had somewhere to go.
A four-part machine, not a magic trick
The repeatable part of TogoRun's work is not celebrity casting or a clever slogan. It is the sequence. Start with a true but neglected tension. Give it a messenger with standing. Surround the audience with several credible encounters. Define an action beyond “awareness.” This works for a screening test, a medical device, a health-equity campaign, or a nonprofit. It is less useful when the underlying evidence is weak, when leadership will not expose the real tension, or when the only desired outcome is applause.
The copyable part / a campaign in four moves
The agency can run that sequence because its bench is oddly broad for a firm of roughly seventeen people. Its services include strategy, media relations, public affairs, advocacy, branding, digital marketing, websites, events, video, animation, and crisis counsel. The health specialization matters. A team that has handled FDA citizen petitions, recalls, black-box warnings, lawsuits, and 24-hour newsrooms is less likely to confuse a bold idea with an allowable one.
What failed first
The most useful culture story is not an award. Janata has described an unnamed campaign whose original strategy did not survive. Jimmy Aguilar, who joined as an intern during the 2020 spinout, brought research and personal experience from a family member's cancer journey. Leadership changed both the strategy and the creative direction. The detail matters because listening is cheap until it overturns work already done.
By 2026, TogoRun had won its third Inc. Best Workplaces honor and seventh consecutive Inc. award. Its workplace score was 97.86 out of 100, every respondent rated themselves highly engaged, and the team chose one word for its culture: “fun.” Treat award-program numbers as one instrument, not an MRI. Still, the evidence lines up with the operating story - a small team where a junior voice can redirect the sled.
The cost TogoRun chooses to publish. Client fees and the acquisition price remain private. The agency says it provides up to $1 million in pro bono services annually, previously described as at least 11 percent of team time.
The inconvenient economics of purpose
Pro bono work is where values meet the utilization spreadsheet. TogoRun's relationships with Pure Earth and Mission Plasticos have lasted years, not news cycles. Its team helped make pollution legible as a health problem, supported reporting around an estimated nine million premature deaths, and connected reconstructive-surgery access to volunteers and patients. Donating at least eleven percent of time means declining some billable work. Purpose has a cost center.
That choice also clarifies where TogoRun sits in the market. A multinational network can offer owned offices everywhere. A narrow boutique can offer a few senior specialists. TogoRun's bet is a compact experienced core, an in-house creative shop, a digital sister agency, and external partners when geography expands. The customer is typically a pharmaceutical company, biotech, medical-device maker, provider, payer, nonprofit, association, beauty brand, or consumer-health business with a consequential claim and several audiences who distrust one another.
The useful boundary
The method needs a defensible fact, access to people who understand it, and permission to change the first idea. Without those conditions, “untold story” becomes decoration. With them, the reader can copy the sequence without copying the sled dogs.
Togo, the dog, became interesting because the popular version of the relay left out the longest run. TogoRun's business is built on the same editorial itch: look again at the distance nobody noticed. In healthcare, that may be a research protocol broad enough to include every skin type, a patient who needs an easier screening option, or a volunteer surgeon waiting for a reason to raise a hand. The firm does not manufacture those facts. Its best work makes them difficult to overlook.