Adnexus Therapeutics Opens Doors for Employee Referrals (and an IPO)

The Adnexus Therapeutics staffing team has engaged OHO to develop the concept and creative for its upcoming recruitment open house to be held in mid-September. This is the third peer-to-peer recruitment effort OHO has been engaged with for life sciences companies. OHO worked with Adnexus earlier this year to develop career fair materials for the BIO conference.

In a slightly larger deal, Adnexus also announced that they will be headed into an IPO round of funding.

Philip Johnson Glass House Selects OHO as Web Agency

OHO has just become the web agency for the Philip Johnson Glass House (www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org) – part of the National Trust. I couldn't be more thrilled.

The Glass House is in my home town of New Canaan, CT. I remember peeking over the stone wall to get a glimpse of the house when it was still Johnson's private residence. (We were yelled at by the caretaker to "Get out of here.") And, I've always had a passion for modern architecture and design – in the 8th grade I wrote a "paper" on Johnson's famous post-modern AT&T building in New York City.

In 1993, my parents gave me a copy of the then recently published book on the Glass House complied by David Whitney. They purchased it at the New Canaan Book Store signing attended by the architect and the author. The inscriptions reads: "With best wishes in the graphic design! – Philip Johnson and David Whitney." It's strange to be entrusted with representing a portion of his most private legacy on the internet.

OHO will take over the work begun by Pentagram to enhance the interactive elements of the site and provide a more robust content management solution. The Glass House has also selected our web-based press room, MediaBridge, to handle the massive press inquiries.

"Visible Results" Campaign: Snitching an Idea from Our Own Playbook

Earlier this year we pioneered advertising on the EZ Ride Shuttle in Cambridge. This private shuttle service transports North Station commuters to the heart of the life sciences community in Cambridge.

For the cost of one half-page Sunday Boston Globe ad, we were able to secure advertising on an entire fleet of shuttle buses for one month. The campaign helped raised the profile of Synta, a Lexington-based biotech company. The ads made an impression: "You are everywhere!" other folks told our client.

We seized the opportunity to advertise to the Cambridge life science community this summer with a set of our own ads promoting one of our three lines of business: life science recruitment advertising.

Vertex Raises Profile for Recruiting with Online Campaign

We just wrapped up a massive online campaign for Vertex Pharmaceuticals (www.vrtx.com) to help them recruit talent from New Jersey and Philadelphia. The results were fantastic: over 28,000 visitors to the careers section in 3 months with an average increase of over 100% in traffic from the target geographic regions. The client reported an increase in resume flow over the three months as well.

Once again, the campaign demonstrated the power of Google to us. Google allows us to target ads (text, banners, rich-media) on specific non-Google web sites such as LinkedIn, The New York Times, or many life science specific sites. For one biotech hub site, we explored purchasing banner ads directly – the cost for three months: nearly $24,000. We were able to run the same number of ad impressions using Google ad placement for just $1,500 and generate nearly 1,000 clicks or about $1.50 a visitor.

Google and Yahoo search engine advertising campaigns also delivered some of the top results. See the creative and read the full report.