York/Alpern Agency Bought by Doyle Dane : L.A. Firm Specializes in Health-Care Clients
Doyle Dane Bernbach Group, a New York-based advertising agency whose independence was threatened last year when clients Atari and Polaroid took their multimillion-dollar ad accounts elsewhere, said Friday that it has bought York/Alpern Inc. of Los Angeles.
Terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition of York/Alpern, a 10-year-old advertising firm that specializes in creating campaigns for health-care concerns such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Nursing Center and HealthNet, the state’s largest health maintenance organization, gives Doyle Dane a larger presence in that field.
It also places Doyle Dane-- whose clients include Ortho Pharmaceutical, Upjohn Co., CIGNA Corp., Western Airlines, Volkswagen, Chanel Inc. and Popeyes-- in a firmer position to benefit from the general business boom in California, which has helped push up billings at agencies here at nearly twice the rate of those of their New York counterparts, according to a study by the U.S. Commerce Department.
“A key part of our long-term growth strategy is the expansion and strengthening of our services in the West,” Barry E. Loughrane, president and chief executive of Doyle Dane, said in a prepared statement.
“With the acquisition of York/Alpern,” Loughrane continued, we “will be better positioned to seize new opportunities and compete in one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing segments of business today. That growth is particularly evident in the West.”
Health-Care Ads for Women
As one of the few Los Angeles advertising agencies headed by women, the privately held York/Alpern agency has been among the pioneers of health-care advertising aimed at women.
It designed an ad for a multispecialty medical group in Redondo Beach that spotlights the problems of the working mother. The ad, which shows an exhausted female executive suffering from a cold and a twisted ankle, observes: “On the job and off . . . it’s the dozens of minor illnesses and injuries that don’t require the hours of waiting or expense of a hospital emergency room” that complicate a woman’s life; the “Urgent Care Center is there for those times.”
Karen York, chief executive of the Los Angeles agency, which had 14 employees and billings of $10 million in 1984, said that she and co-founder Barbara Alpern decided to sell their firm because rapid client growth was taxing the agency’s resources. Negotiations with Doyle Dane began in February, she said.
Although she declined to say how much Doyle Dane paid for the privately held concern, York said that she and Alpern were “very happy with the deal” and that both would retain their current titles and responsibilities.
Doyle Dane Bernbach, the world’s 10th-largest ad agency with 1984 revenue of $213.2 million and net income of $8.7 million, spent much of 1984 attempting “to re-establish our pre-eminence in the advertising business” after the pullout of Atari and of Polaroid, which had been a client for 30 years, according to the company’s annual report.
That review, in part, involved a closer focus on bolstering Doyle Dane’s health advertising specialty business, which, along with Doyle Dane’s three other specialty units, contributed 22% of Doyle Dane’s $1.5 billion in 1984 billings, up from just 3% of $700 million in 1979, according to the annual report.
