Stephen has spent the past 30+ years focused on communications for the healthcare sector – working with high profile pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, health and wellbeing brands across many therapeutic areas. In that time, he has worked on numerous award-winning campaigns relating to disease awareness, medical education, brand launches and revitalisation.

He founded Page & Page with Kate Page, Creative and Managing Director, in 2014. What sets Page & Page apart from its competitors, is the agency’s core and founding value – Active Consideration. As an agency we immerse ourselves in the client’s world and take the time to understand their audience(s) so we can be sure that every campaign resonates with whoever it is aimed at – patient, specialist or healthcare professional. By seeing the world through other people’s eyes, we can truly understand the world from their perspective and communicate with them better.

Stephen’s commitment to Active Consideration is hugely influential across the whole Page & Page team. It has been particularly evident during COVID, where he has empathised and acknowledged that all members of the team will have been affected in different ways by the challenges lockdown has brought. 

As well as empathy being a foundation of the agency, so too is Stephen’s design background (he is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers). Because of this, all projects are creatively led (unlike many agencies in this area) and, in addition, follow a risk mitigating, solution-based process. For instance, the business uses the Design Council’s 4D process – ‘discover, define, develop and deliver’. This process is key to the way that the agency works day-to-day. 

• Discover – Gather insight into healthcare professionals and their patients.
• Define – Build these insights into a vision, highlighting the best way to immerse the target audience so they empathise with the healthcare professional and patient.
• Develop – Build a strategy for relevant, accessible, compelling and clear content.
• Deliver – Use the strategy to inform campaigns and tactics, all the while ensuring great user experiences and achieving superb business results.

It is due to this combination of empathy, creativity and risk mitigation that Page & Page is a Top 40 independent in the healthcare sector, winning awards and gaining new clients annually. 

Recent successful campaigns that Stephen and the team have worked on include: 

• A campaign that considered the world from the perspective of patients living with chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU). By combining insights gleaned from social listening, design principles and active consideration the team took real patient experiences and created a multi-channel campaign centred around a hard-hitting video that brought those experiences to life, revealing the true horror that many patients live with every day.  Since its launch, the campaign has been very well received and is currently being translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish to be rolled out in regional markets. The campaign has also just won a Gold and a Silver Award at this year’s PM Society’s Award.

• Invisalign’s You Go Beyond campaign – a winner at the PM Society Digital Awards.

• Causal campaign to raise awareness of dehydration especially among the frail and elderly (Communique winner 2019).

• Launch of a self-care revolution around venous leg ulcers (VLUs). 

While this work has very much been a team effort, it is the team Stephen has built with Kate and the values they have instilled in everyone that have ultimately culminated in this success for both Page & Page and our clients.

Stephen’s commitment to increasing the effectiveness of communication within the healthcare sector reaches beyond the walls of the agency and across the wider industry – he is a member of the PM Society’s Industry/Agency Relationship Interest Group (IARIG). The purpose of this group is to ensure that agencies and pharma companies learn to understand each other better so that they can work more effectively together.

Looking to the future, Stephen has introduced the ‘Apex Programme’ for the senior team (The Partners) at Page & Page – a comprehensive, bespoke development programme spreading across two years. It’s an illustration of his dedication to the team and the business – a significant investment in terms of time, money and effort which epitomises his whole approach. 

In doing all of this, Stephen (and the rest of Page & Page) is driving real change in healthcare communications by building a team of people who truly want to make a difference. It’s an approach he hopes will ultimately drive industry-wide change.