Thomas Harrison is chairman and chief executive officer of Diversified Agency Services, a marketing and communications company. It specializes in public relations, crisis management, branding, sales promotion, customer relationship management and health care advertising.
A division of the Omnicom Group, Diversified has more than 5,000 worldwide clients and annual revenues of almost $5 billion.
Under Thomas’ watch, Diversified has more than quadrupled in size and now accounts for almost 60 percent Omnicom’s revenues.
Thomas’ multi-faceted career brought him to Omnicom in 1992, when the firm he co-founded, Harrison & Star Business Group, the most successful and rapidly growing agency in the health care industry at the time, was acquired.
With an advanced degree in cell biology and physiology, Thomas began his career at Pfizer Laboratories as a sales representative and left Pfizer as marketing director. He then joined a mid-sized health care advertising agency for six years before starting his own company, The Harrison & Star Business Group. His company started a health care advertising agency, a medical education company, a direct-to-consumer health care company and a medical PR group and acquired a managed care consultancy.
Thomas serves on a number of prestigious boards. They include Montefiore Hospital, New York Academy of Medicine, New York chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, ePocrates, a health care information company, The Morgans Hotel Group, The Lymphoma Research Foundation and several marketing services companies.
He was president of a local Westchester County school board and founder of an education foundation in that Westchester school district. He has served as co-chairman of the New York chapter of the U.S. Olympic Committee, raising substantial funds to support U.S. Olympic athletes
Thomas frequently speaks at business forums and universities on entrepreneurialism and business strategies. In 2006, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from West Virginia University and an honorary doctorate in 2007. He was keynote speaker at The McGraw Hill Medical Publishers Annual Awards program.
Harrison is the author of the recently published book INSTINCT Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals.