Over the past few years, CEO Hans Kaspersetz has steered the Springfield, New Jersey-based Arteric through a period of rapid growth. In 2017, Arteric’s revenue was $3.95 million. By the end of 2018, that number had jumped more than 30%, to $5.15 million. In the same time frame, Arteric added a single employee to bring to the total 24, even as it grew and diversified its client base.
For Kaspersetz, success didn’t happen overnight. His ascension to digital agency CEO has been a long and winding journey that began when he was only 8 years old and first developed a fascination with computers and coding. By 1999, Kaspersetz was in his mid-20s and building websites for a steady stream of clients under the banner of the newly minted Arteric.
The company settled into its stride in the mid-aughts by focusing almost entirely on healthcare clients. But by 2013, it faced its first major challenge: holding companies and larger agencies had finally caught up in the digital realm, offering clients nice-looking websites, apps and other digital assets.
It was time for some soul-searching, Kaspersetz recalls. “We asked ourselves two questions: ‘Where are we going to play?’ and, ‘How are we going to win?’” The answer to both, Kaspersetz and his colleagues eventually realized, was to double down on Arteric’s digital roots.
“We are software developers who decided to crush it in healthcare marketing,” he says.
For the past few years, Arteric has been doing just that. In 2017, Arteric began to strategically diversify its client base, moving away from working almost exclusively for Celgene and bringing on organizations such as Sanofi Genzyme, AstraZeneca and Arbor Pharmaceuticals.
Arteric managed to expand beyond Celgene without losing any revenue from the company, Kaspersetz reports. “In fact, our revenue from Celgene grew.”
Meanwhile, Arteric was ahead of the machine learning and AI curve, deploying those technologies as early as 2016 to help clients bolster their search engine optimization. Indeed, for the past several years, Arteric has been using natural language processing — a subfield of AI and computer science — to better inform digital marketing efforts. As Kaspersetz explains, natural language processing is an extremely useful tool when it comes to finding synonyms for related words that Google does not inherently “know” are related to one another.
By way of example, Kaspersetz notes that Google does not see “health insurance coverage” and “formulary coverage” as synonymous or related. So Arteric came up with a strategy to create what he calls “colloquial relationships” between those phrases.
Kaspersetz is devoting much of his attention nowadays to thinking about the future of digital marketing, which he believes will include more screen-less interfaces with the internet, such as Siri or Alexa. How do you do digital advertising without a screen? You’ve got to be really, really good at making sure your webpage is the top hit on a Google search result, because that’s the only piece of content Alexa and Siri will read out loud. Check back in soon to see if Arteric has managed to master that particular task.
From the July 01, 2019 Issue of MM&M – Medical Marketing and Media