Joni Ramirez
Group Director
Joni Ramirez has more than 25 years of award-winning agency and in-house experience and has been working with Merryman Communications since 2014.
At Merryman Communications, Joni oversees communications programs for early-stage companies, content creation and digital marketing programs for established companies and ongoing marketing and communications support for hospitals and health systems. Her areas of expertise include clinical trial recruitment, social media community management, product-related marketing and communications, corporate identity systems and website development, corporate and product milestone support and ongoing media relations campaigns. Her work has touched diabetes, oncology, orthopedics (spine, shoulder and knee), telemedicine, radiology, urology, and general and vascular surgery.
Joni brings big agency experience to Merryman Communications, having spent more than 10 years at many top public relations firms. Most recently, she served as vice president in Edelman’s health care practice. In that role, she specialized in data, FDA milestone and issues communication for pharmaceutical and biotech companies in many different therapeutic areas, including diabetes, immunology, oncology and rheumatology. Early in her career, she held positions of increasing responsibility at GolinHarris, Communicore, FischerHealth and Ruder Finn.
Joni has also worked in-house as director of marketing and public relations for Miller Children's Hospital/Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where she oversaw a $3 million internal and external marketing and communications program. Among her accomplishments were spearheading the development of a new logo and advertising campaign; creating a year-long 100th anniversary "Century of Care" campaign; handling communications for a $151 million expansion project; supporting service line marketing with brochure development and ongoing television, radio, print and outdoor ad buys; handling internal communications for nursing union related issues, including a strike; ensuring ongoing local and national media exposure; and revamping employee communications, including redesigning the employee newsletter and intranet site.
She is an excellent writer with a keen ability to translate complex information into easy-to-understand language. She is also an experienced editor with a nose for grammar, punctuation, consistency and AP style errors.
Joni earned her master's in business administration and bachelor's in journalism/public relations degrees from California State University, Long Beach, where she also was a part-time instructor in the undergraduate public relations program for more than 20 years.