ZPB acquires Journalista

ZPB Associates has announced they have purchased Journalista, an acquisition that enhances the former’s reputation as the UK’s prominent independent healthcare communications agency, and provides a platform for growth in line with the strategic growth programme unveiled this year. Combining these two companies will allow ZPB to grow their status as a company that incorporates intelligence, authenticity and insight into its marketing and communications strategies.

Holly Sutton, Journalista Founder, stated: “ZPB and Journalista operate in similar spaces, with shared values, mutually supportive services and a vision for making complex issues clearer for people across health and social care, research and digital. We’ve done great work together in the past and our teams are similarly drawn from varied specialist backgrounds, so it makes sense for us to join forces to better support and expand what we offer to our healthcare, research, social support and university clients. Becoming part of ZPB means we can offer a stronger proposition to compete for the opportunities arising in the fusion of health and social care, research and digital.”

Zoe Bedford, ZPB Founder and CEO, stated: “We have a particular skill in bringing new insights through our strong understanding of health system dynamics, data, what you can and can’t do with it, and how to use it in high-impact campaigns. Often people who understand data don’t know how to communicate, and people who know how to communicate don’t know how to work with data. That’s ZPB’s niche. Boosting our communications offer is critical to us having even more impact with these insights, so bringing Journalista into our team is a really exciting development for us. We have worked alongside Journalista founder Holly and her team for a number of years, often sharing clients, so this feels like a natural move. We know that clients prefer independent, highly specialised consultancies like ours, so this allows us to remain independent whilst having a bigger team with more resource to compete with some of the larger players.”