The chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s largest holding group of marketing services companies will speak to West Virginia University’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) graduate students during the School of Journalism’s Second Annual IMC Information and Reunion Weekend June 2-3.
Tom Harrison of Diversified Agency Services (DAS) will deliver the keynote address during the evening events scheduled for Saturday, June 3.
Under Harrison’s leadership, DAS provides marketing communication services to some of the top brands in the healthcare field. With over 5,000 worldwide clients, DAS has annual revenues of almost $4 billion and is the fastest growing unit among those operated by Omnicom, an advertising and marketing services organization.
Harrison is a graduate of WVU with an advanced degree in cell biology and physiology. After working for Pfizer Laboratories, first as a sales representative, and then as marketing director, Harrison left to pursue a career in healthcare advertising. He spent six years working at an agency and then branched out on his own, opening The Harrison&Star Business Group.
As a full-service communications agency, Harrison&Star provides advertising, public relations and customer service support to healthcare clients. Harrison, one of the early proponents of a combined approach to marketing communications known as IMC , used this innovative method to make Harrison&Star the most successful and fastest growing agency in the healthcare industry.
In 1992, Omnicom acquired Harrison&Star and Harrison served as chairman, while also assuming that same role for Diversified Healthcare Communications, a group of eight healthcare agencies within Omnicom. In 1997, he was appointed as president of DAS and was named chairman and chief executive officer in 1998. Under Harrison’s leadership, DAS now accounts for nearly 60 percent of Omnicom’s total revenues.
Harrison’s strong belief in the unique benefits derived from IMC led him to play an integral role in the creation of WVU ’s IMC master’s degree program. This program, housed within the School of Journalism , is the only exclusively on-line graduate program in this field. Currently, over 150 students from across the U.S. are enrolled in the 39 hour graduate program.
Tom Harrison is the perfect choice to deliver the keynote address at the IMC graduation recognition ceremony,said WVU School of Journalism Dean Maryanne Reed.He is one of the world’s leading experts in strategic communications and will inspire students with his own success story.
Harrison is also the author ofINSTINCT: Tapping at Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goalspublished by Warner Business Books. He serves on a number of boards including Montefiore Hospital , the New York Chapter of the Arthritis
Foundation, ePocrates (a healthcare information company), as well as several marketing services companies. He was president of the Westchester County School Board and also served as chairman and founder of the not-for-profit education foundation in the Westchester School District .
A frequent guest speaker on the topics of entrepreneurialism, business strategies and acquisitions, he has spoken previously at WVU , as well as serving as the keynote speaker at The McGraw Hill Medical Publishers Annual Awards program and at a recent Management Conference of Healthcare Communications Specialist.