May21

Don’t Be Fooled: The Core Tenets of Relationship Marketing Are Timeless

Posted by Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America

By Peter von Bartheld from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America | Published: May 21, 2013

DartGoing back to basics on effective communication can lead to a big impact on your audience.

Pharmaceutical marketing at a glance seems unrecognizable compared to a few short years ago: technological advancements, big data, changing sales models, channel fragmentation, mobile marketing, social media…the list goes on. This constant sea of change is enough to overwhelm even the smartest marketers and strategists. Some marketers have followed the whims of change, prioritizing the latest marketing fads over a sound strategy. However, this reprioritization of communication efforts can lead to risky results. Pharmaceutical marketers will be best served by keeping their focus on the following fundamental marketing objective: getting the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Without a doubt, incorporating modern tactics and media channels can strengthen a campaign’s effectiveness, but the core communication objective should be tied to strategic objectives. In other words, the tail should not wag the proverbial dog. These core objectives should drive the decisions behind the channels, the content, the cadence, and the outcomes toward which a campaign is optimized.

The focus on fundamentals is essential across both patient and healthcare professional marketing campaigns. For example, with traditional patient support programs—which educate patients on their disease state, provide them with lifestyle tips, and empower them with condition management tools—the ultimate objective is to increase persistency and adherence. Rather than haphazardly building a program that randomly combines the latest marketing “it” channels, it is imperative to strategically consider the combination of tactics, channels, and content, at the right cadence to achieve the campaign’s goal: increasing adherence and persistency. While a campaign can and should incorporate channels both old and new, it should be the strategy that drives these decisions.

How to Focus on Fundamentals When Determining a Marketing Strategy

So, how can marketers effectively deliver communications in the ever-changing marketing reality? In the era of data integration and two-way marketing, we recommend using these three best practices to guide the process:

1)      Don’t be afraid to ask—so you can know what they are thinking: A behavioral survey can identify how targets would prefer to receive communications, such as by telephone, email or direct mail. Using this information, design a communication strategy that provides relevant information in the way(s) they want to receive it. By simply asking how an individual wants to be communicated with and by fulfilling that basic need, marketers can more successfully deliver the brand’s message and increase conversion.

2)      Observe, adjust, and make them feel special: With the phenomenal growth and availability of campaign response data, marketers have the opportunity to design and cater communications at the individual level. Creating customized communications and educational tools based on a target’s experience can ultimately lead to greater engagement and positive, impactful outcomes.

3)      Think like them—to understand what they need: As marketers, we measure success by driving impact and ultimately changing behavior. With the data at hand, we can now design and adjust strategies, all the while focusing on the brand’s fundamental goals. These metrics and objectives allow us, as marketers, to start thinking like our targets and asking questions that drive stronger campaigns:

A) What do our targets want and need?

B) How can we strategically design a program to meet these wants and needs?

C) How will we know if we met our targets’ wants and needs?

By remembering to follow these three steps when developing a CRM strategy, we can impact behavior by creating custom relationships based on trust, respect, and value…all by delivering the right message in the right way to the right person.

So while the marketing context, customers and channels have changed and will continue to change rapidly for the foreseeable future, we as marketers must keep our focus on our core, timeless tenets of good marketing: sending the right message at the right time and the right place. By applying some of these best practices, you should be well on your way to maintaining a sound strategy amongst the ever-changing marketing landscape.
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Apr25

When Will Pharmaceutical Companies Embrace Behavioral Retargeting to Drive Adherence?

Posted by James Ruiz from Ogilvy CommonHealth - NJ, North America

By James Ruiz from Ogilvy CommonHealth - NJ, North America | Published: April 25, 2013

Shopping KeyPicture this: You visit a website, add something to your shopping cart, but abandon the transaction. Maybe you are distracted or decide to shop around to get the best deal.

The next day, you’re on a different website. Suddenly an ad pops up on your screen…for that item you had in the shopping cart the day before. In your mind you’re thinking, “Wow, maybe this ad is an omen that I should buy that item?”

You’ll be relieved to learn that the ad is not an omen. It’s just “behavioral retargeting,” one of the tools that a smart marketer is leveraging to capture your attention. They want you back at their site to complete the purchase.

Digital channels can leverage relevancy (based on action and exposure) to deliver highly motivating advertising. If it works well for consumer products, how would this work for pharmaceutical brands?

The Web as a Research Tool
The Internet is used by consumers to compare prices and features. What we find online often influences both online and offline purchasing decisions. In the early days of the Internet, consumers were leery of making significant purchases online and would compare prices on the web then go to a brick-and-mortar store to make their purchase. With improved mobile technology, consumers now see and touch products in stores, only to make the purchase online. Many consumers are now willing to make major purchases online.

The prescription drug buying process is different. Some consumers see advertising for lifestyle drugs on TV and in print, go online for additional information, and ask their doctor for a prescription. If their doctor agrees, they may receive a prescription. A pharmaceutical website for a prescription drug may play a role in initial patient-doctor discussion, but it can really play a much more significant role in influencing medication adherence.

Behavioral Retargeting to Influence Good Behavior
We see many prescription drugs with elaborate, multichannel medication adherence programs that often have minimal impact on the bottom line. The reasons for this are twofold.

  1. Programs that are dependent on patients signing up tend to have very limited reach against the patient base.
  2. They often attract patients who are adherent, so there is little opportunity to increase sales. We also see programs where enrollment is driven by activating a savings card—but too often patients are unaware they joined the program and don’t engage with the communications they receive.

What if we used behavioral retargeting to increase awareness of compliance programs? Imagine if retargeting didn’t just apply to shoes and baby clothes, but also encouraged medication adherence.

Behavioral retargeting provides the ability to extend reach and deliver highly relevant adherence messages contextually, then bring consumers back to your site for deeper content. It provides an additional channel to get key adherence messages to customers who might not sign up for a program.

Then again, even if we can do it, we may not want to deliver behavioral retargeting. After all, some patients have conditions that they’d rather keep private. They may not appreciate a reminder message from a pharma company that manifests as a banner ad on their favorite website. If this is the case, such issues can easily be addressed with a simple opt-out that prevents future retargeting from the ad server.

These days, behavioral retargeting is closely associated with advanced ecommerce websites. Looking forward, it will probably become another tool for communicating with patients and healthcare professionals. Before that happens, industry thought leaders need to think carefully about how patient health information is used and retargeted across different websites, channels, and platforms.

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Apr18

Sharpening Up the Industry’s Smartest Teams

Posted by David Chapman from OCHWW - NJ, North America

By David Chapman from OCHWW - NJ, North America | Published: April 18, 2013

GraphOgilvy CommonHealth Worldwide (OCHWW) purchases a unique and expansive range of syndicated research, currently providing access to over 30 different sources. In January, the management, oversight and strategic deployment of these properties were aggregated within the Global Business Intelligence and Integration (GBII) Skill Center led by industry veteran David Chapman.

The GBII Skill Center is dedicated to helping staff know what the research assets are and learn how to gain access to the incredible depth of resources that exist at OCHWW. The key point here is that this depth of resources allows Planners, Account Management and Creative to gain insights into the market and brand that help develop winning, innovative ideas. Starting from facts allows them to speak with authority and awe the client with new perspectives on how to drive brand growth.

The GBII team continually evaluates and analyzes the properties we buy or can access now through Ogilvy, trying to assure the best data and the broadest reach of global and US markets, disease states, therapeutic categories, audiences (both professional and consumer), channel, digital usage/preference, and more.

One example is GlobalData’s Pharma eTrack, which combines much of the information found in Datamonitor, Pharmaprojects, ClinicalTrials.gov, The Pink Sheet, and news aggregators such as FierceBiotech and more, in one simple-to-use site. Information is available by molecule, by compound, by drug, by category, by pipeline, by disease state, by company and by country…including comprehensive US, global and/or regional in-depth reports on key disease states.

Some of the others include:

  • MARS (Multimedia Audience Research Systems) for OTC/DTC data
  • eMarketer  and Compete – online behavior and digital research
  • Manhattan Research – HCP online usage and habits
  • Yankelovich Monitor – consumer research
  • IMS/NDTI – prescribing and diagnosis information

To socialize the inventory of our syndicated research properties and the “power users” who provide guidance and interpretation, staff can access all this information in the Intelligence Center site on the organization’s secure intranet.

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Apr9

Painting by Numbers: Using Enterprise-wide Analytics to Guide Marketing Strategy

Posted by Christina Connor from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America

By Christina Connor from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America | Published: April 9, 2013

Paint Brush Man_Thumbnail

Today, analytics is playing an ever-expanding role in developing marketing strategy as clients have become aware of the importance of data in guiding campaign decisions. Like the Paint by Numbers crafts of our childhood, marketers can use stats and data points to guide the creative marketing process, resulting in a more predictable end-product.

However, according to a recent Accenture study, the same brand managers who understand the importance of analytics tend to rely on gut instinct instead of logical recommendations, preferring to paint outside the lines rather than follow the data.

The reason for this departure is that analytics is still typically brought in on a project-by-project basis.  While a team of expert analysts may provide insight on one particular channel or campaign, they do not have a panoramic view of the overarching strategy or history of the brand. The brand manager’s gut, on the other hand, has years of experience in overall performance, customer relations, and sales. This often results in a strategy that conforms to a “more of the same” mentality.

Within the Ogilvy Healthworld Marketing Analytics & Consulting team, we have found that insights and recommendations  can be more impactful when done at a portfolio or enterprise level. For example, we had been performing analytics for a particular brand, observing that over time, the paid search costs were increasing for unbranded terms. Over the next year, we grew our analytics practice across this pharma company’s entire therapeutic department. When the data started to pour in, our analysis uncovered that two brands were competing against each another for the same unbranded terms, artificially driving the costs up. By taking an above-brand look at the data, we were able to identify an issue and resolve it in a way that benefited both brands and became a best practice across the therapeutic area.

While this example looks at a very specific issue, enterprise analytics has a number of strategic benefits:

  • First, it sets a tone of accountability across brands, defining a standard of data quality that can be enforced in measurement and optimization. Not only does this ensure that different groups are using the same metrics to define success, but also it makes it easier to compare performance across brands and categories. Over time, this organized collection of data can serve as a starting point for performing more advanced modeling and predictive analytics.
  • Second, strategic data collection and analyses can offer dramatic cost-savings as each brand does not have to finance its own projects and can anticipate a more organized array of reporting and analysis options.
  • Third, enterprise-wide analytics enables across-the-board education in reporting and data. At this time, many brand managers are in the habit of glancing at a report for information, but not yet using it as a compass by which to navigate. With an enterprise-wide analytics presence, these brand managers are forced to embrace the numbers and start making more strategic brand recommendations. The result is a more consistent and strategic step forward in marketing growth and optimization.

Ultimately, analytics and reliance on predictive modeling are here to stay. As marketing partners, it is our responsibility to make our clients as agile as possible and ensure they have the most accurate information in their toolbox while making decisions. So the next time your clients go to the easel and begin painting their strategic plan, make sure they have numbers to guide their work of art.

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Feb26

Sleuthing for Clues: A Planner’s Story

Posted by Natasha Sinha from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America

By Natasha Sinha from Ogilvy Healthworld - New York, North America | Published: February 26, 2013

SleuthingI am currently an associate rotating through Ogilvy Healthworld’s planning department. This month I have been tasked with working on an oncology brand in its mission to become the drug of choice for HCPs when prescribing patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) a first- or second-line treatment. As an agency, we must develop a bold new campaign that will differentiate the brand from its largest competitors.

But how do you even begin the process of developing a creative campaign? The answer starts with a key insight, and it’s the planner’s job to provide it.

During my rotation, I have learned that it is the planner’s responsibility to uncover key insights and turn them into a story that inspires, provokes, and connects. To find these insights, planners must look at factual research through the eyes of a storyteller. Can we find a fresh new perspective to highlight? Have we overlooked a key pain point or desire of HCPs that no one else is addressing? Is there a better way to tell the story? These are the kind of questions that planners need to ask themselves as they sift through pages and pages of data.

During my own search for insights, I teamed up with another planner to scour many reports and decks. Our intent was not only to learn more about the brand’s competitors, but also to strategize a way to differentiate it from the others. Through co-collaboration, the two of us turned stats and quotes into ideas. We then took these ideas and boiled them down in simplicity. From there, we were able to come up with 6 distinct insights that we felt were ready to inspire the creative team.

Here is a list of our initial rough ideas:

  • · Brand X gives you the power to put your best foot forward when treating CML.
  • · Brand X: confidence that you are setting a higher standard.
  • · Brand X provides confidence/certainty regardless of the scenario.
  • · Brand X: satisfaction/confidence that you are not settling for less.
  • · Brand X gets you to where you need to be faster.
  • · Brand X allows you to start strong for the best chance at success.

During our meeting, we deliberated on which ideas were best, and how to repurpose what survived. Planners must work in unison with creatives to develop a strong idea for the campaign. If a concept requires too much explanation, it is often eliminated. Keeping it simple is key, as it arms the creative team with a higher degree of clarity when developing an image.

At the end of our first meeting with one member of the creative team, we had one solid idea:

       Different patients, different risks, different challenges, one solution.

At the end of our second meeting with the creative and account teams, we had an additional idea we thought was executable:

       A faster response for a more positive conversation.

Before we can hand over the reins to the creative team, we need our client to pick between the two strategies. But before we can send the ideas to the clients, the planners have to provide the rationale—the why—behind the campaign strategy.

My fellow planner and I are currently back again in the decks and reports, pulling insights that support why these two ideas are valid for the brand as a basis for its new campaign. We will build a deck in the next 24 hours and send it off to the client by the end of the week.

Which campaign do you think they will choose?

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Feb7

How Communications Can Support Mergers and Acquisitions

Posted by Nicole Yost from OgilvyHealthPR - London, UK

By Nicole Yost from OgilvyHealthPR - London, UK | Published: February 7, 2013

Merger-and-AcquisitionWith mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the pharmaceutical sector showing no signs of slowing down, there has been criticism of some deals in recent years. These acts of consolidation don’t always reap the fruits they set out to bear and, if not managed well, may even result in a stifling of innovation, reduction in R&D productivity and decreased value of the company.

In a recent study as part of an MBA project, a survey and interviews were conducted among a sample of biotechnology and pharmaceutical company employees with experience of M&A deals, to find out their thoughts about communications during the M&A process.

Deal-making in the pharmaceutical sector is seen as a means of growth and competitive advantage through, for example, access to new markets or geographies; growth in R&D pipelines; access to scientific expertise in a given therapy or technology area; access to sales and marketing expertise; complementary skills and company synergies. The last few years have seen big pharma facing thinning pipelines and patent expiries, and for some, M&A activity is a means of gaining additional assets, innovation and technologies.

M&A activity has swept the industry, leading to some large and high-profile deals.  Despite the urge to merge, studies show that failure rates for M&As in general are high. Reasons cited for failures include poor corporate governance, poor valuation of the acquired firm, and bad post-acquisition management, including poor communication with employees and mismanaged integration of staff and departments.

Survey findings

In the 70-person survey of pharma and biotech employees with experience of M&A, 92% of respondents said their company had previous experience of M&A within the organization, with 57% saying further M&A was planned within the next 12 months.

The main reasons given for the deals were: access to R&D or pipeline, company growth or defense, entry to new areas or markets, and entry to new product areas. Some 52% of respondents said there had been some restructuring or significant restructuring of their part of the business post-M&A.

In describing the cultures of the two organizations in the M&A, 59% of respondents said the cultures were different or totally different, with 88% of respondents saying they believed it is important to create a company with common values and behaviors for M&A success.

As shown in table 1, survey respondents felt that communication with staff was deemed important for a variety of outcomes, including productivity, staff satisfaction and shareholder value.

Table 1: Summary of survey responses to importance of communications for different outcomes

Extremely important Very important Somewhat important Neither important nor unimportant Somewhat unimportant Not at all important
Staff satisfaction 40%  40% 15% 1.9% 0  1.9%
Productivity 40% 40% 9.6% 3.8% 1.9% 3.8%
Shareholder value 43% 30% 19% 1.88% 0 5.7%
Reducing levels of uncertainty 26% 52% 13% 0 4.3% 4.3%
Setting your own expectations 8.7% 39% 26% 13% 4.3% 8.7%

Talking to staff is not always a priority when doing a deal. As one interviewee commented, “The main focus is the deal itself and the financial benefits, synergies and scale. Companies don’t always think about the broader implications beyond this, so insufficient attention is paid to the communications imperatives of creating a new entity.”

“Communicating with external stakeholders—especially shareholders—is prioritized in M&A. I have heard cases where employees first knew of a merger of their company by reading it in the business press.”

Some pharma mergers have seen clashes at different levels especially where the companies coming together have very different cultures and one or the other has to completely change. Communicating about the reasons for the deal can help to gain staff buy-in and support during the M&A process, despite the accompanying uncertainties of change. It can help employees to establish an identity with and a commitment to the new organization.

But creating a single, strong company culture is not the only option. Some companies have maintained the different cultures of their separate organizations to support innovation and productivity from each company.

In the survey, all of the interviewees agreed that in order to reduce the high levels of uncertainty and rumors that tend to develop among employees during M&A, internal communication is vital. They also agreed that communication with employees can support integration, improve staff productivity and help to achieve better M&A outcomes.

“Without employee communications, the water cooler conversations take over. Employees become disengaged, motivation falls and no work is done, driving business performance through the floor.”

“If you don’t communicate, it is mayhem,” said a former Communications Head of a large pharmaceutical company. “All other things being equal, without a planned internal communications program, the desired M&A outcomes will be much more difficult to achieve.”

The survey respondents said the most commonly used forms of communicating with staff were company-wide meetings, written communications such as emails and newsletters, and team and individual meetings.

Graph 1: Communications tools used during M&A

chart

All other things being equal, communicating with staff about the rationale for the deal, the next steps post-merger and what the company changes mean for staff can support the success of a deal.

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Dec17

Brand Stories DO NOT Start With PowerPoint

Posted by Joe Gattuso from OCHWW - NJ, North America

By Joe Gattuso from OCHWW - NJ, North America | Published: December 17, 2012

As with many powerful ideas, the importance of telling brand stories has been drained of meaning and resonance for two reasons:

- Overuse

- Bad practice

It is the second issue (bad practice) that I want to address in this blog, and specifically how bad practice in storytelling compromises the success of our new business pitches and any presentations of consequence.

Story is the most powerful and visceral activity we can engage in when doing everything from insight mining, to communication of corporate culture and values, to creating a brand, to creatively expressing a brand idea. Human beings are cognitively and emotionally wired to tell and listen to stories, and story continues to be the most powerful way to transmit ideas, beliefs, culture, and aesthetic experience whether person-to-person, in mass media, in social media, or in targeted communications. And, this is agreed upon by individuals with as diverse ways of looking at the world as artists, marketers, politicians, and scientists.

However, despite our belief in the power of story and our self-perception as consummate storytellers, we all too often do a poor job of meeting even the most elementary requirements for good narrative.

We often do not engage the audience with a clear articulation of setting, conflict, emotion; we do not chart a clear and undeniable cause-and-effect narrative line with a clear beginning, middle and end; we tell multiple stories as if they were one story, or we confuse data and information with story elements and therefore never sift through the “noise” to get to the “signal” or message.

There are many reasons for these failings—but I would like to suggest that one is our almost universal reliance on PowerPoint as the fundamental means of communication. Just as English has become the so-called “language of business” (not all from every culture would agree!), PowerPoint has become the lingua franca of business, and certainly of our business. And yet, it is a poor instrument with which to create stories.

First of all, PowerPoint encourages small incremental steps (slide by slide by slide) BEFORE the whole story is found or articulated. Second, it encourages the use of tables and charts and data with limited or no context. Third, it makes it difficult to read and adjust the story once you are in front of an audience—are you going too fast, are you going too slow, are you giving too much information (usually the case), or too little?

And, perhaps most insidious, it creates crutches for speakers. It actually encourages lack of preparation—“Well, I’ll just read the bullets,” or, “I’ll just talk to the slide.” (If you talk to the slide, you’re not talking to or even looking at your audience!!!). It’s the difference between an actor reading lines and an actor becoming or inhabiting a character.

Is the answer to eliminate PowerPoint? Well, I certainly would attempt to find other ways of presenting our ideas whenever possible—ones that rely far more heavily on creating a “stage” or sacred space for a storyteller to tell the story. But this is a more radical change and one that will not always be welcomed by the audience.

However, if the final deliverable will be a presentation aided by PowerPoint, I suggest that a flipping of the usual order of creation of a pitch or presentation can make a significant and immediate change to the strength of our presentation…

Usually, we write and edit PowerPoint first—and then practice at the end to “find” and clarify the story.

Flip it!

Write the story first. Write it as if you were speaking it. Don’t worry about anything else but telling a great story. Set the stage, identify and bring the hero to life, dramatize the conflict, identify the obstacles, show how the obstacles are confronted and overcome, bring the conflict to a satisfying and believable conclusion.

The brand story and the marketing prerequisites are all there: the patient journey is a story already. Setting the stage is situation analysis. Identifying the hero is the beginning of establishing the brand promise and essence. Dramatizing the conflict is identifying the driving insights of market analysis. Showing how the obstacles are overcome is the essence of strategy and tactics. Bringing the story to a believable and satisfying conclusion is based on objectives and analytics.

Get the story right first. Then pull out only the essential elements and use PowerPoint as the prompt to the story, storyteller and audience.

This is something we can all do for every presentation right now. It is a first and essential step in creating more powerful brand stories and making them come alive for our audience… THE END!
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Aug29

Communicating Value in Our Changing Healthcare System

Posted by Emily Kidder from Ogilvy CommonHealth Specialty Marketing - NJ, North America

By Emily Kidder from Ogilvy CommonHealth Specialty Marketing - NJ, North America | Published: August 29, 2012

Recently, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a 5-4 ruling essentially upholding the entirety of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). Many Americans, including the millions working in the healthcare industry, have questions about what the SCOTUS decision means. As many of the provisions of the law come on-line in 2014, the full long-term impact is not yet clear. What is certain however is the healthcare sector is changing, fast. The shift toward more patient-centered care and measurable quality-based healthcare outcomes started prior to the 2010 law, and this movement will continue regardless of the ultimate outcome of health reform.

Moving from volume to value

In the healthcare delivery system of the past, providers were paid to treat problems, not prevent them; financial incentives were based on volume versus outcomes and multiple providers with little coordination delivered care. All of which contributed to healthcare costs rising at an unsustainable pace. Now, however, a paradigm shift is upon us.

In the idealized healthcare delivery system of tomorrow, providers are incentivized to increase quality and improve outcomes across their respective populations, infrastructure and processes are used to reduce variations and better coordinate care, and healthcare spending becomes a purposeful investment in value. Indeed, almost three-quarters (73%) of C-suite healthcare executives in a recent survey by Forbes Insights and Allscripts agreed that providers need to begin shifting their focus from “volume to value” immediately.1

The changing definition of “value”

But what does “value” mean in our brave new healthcare world? Value is one of those buzzwords flying around that has been absorbed and redefined by different stakeholders.  For patients, value means improved access to healthcare, high-quality patient-centric care, and improved patient engagement including better patient-provider communication.  For providers, value means ensuring patients receive high-quality accountable care based on best practices, including improved coordination across provider types and sites of care. Additionally, value for providers can mean receiving fair compensation—something that novel delivery systems and payment methods, including patient-centered medical homes and bundled payment schemes seek to address. For administrators, value means ensuring a sustainable healthcare system by placing particular emphasis on reducing waste, errors and redundancy.  The meaning of value in pharmaceuticals is changing as well. Now, not only are safety and efficacy evaluated, but effectiveness and appropriateness of treatment are also considered, while quality of reimbursement is downplayed. Wired health tools, such as electronic health records, are used to support treatment decisions, improve collaboration and measure behavior and outcomes.

How to communicate value now

With greater alignment across audiences, tomorrow’s healthcare delivery system demands more integrated value messages. New ways of communicating with patients and establishing value for the healthcare provider may become even more important. For example, development of safer drugs requiring less counseling, less paperwork, and drugs that have easier access to brand information could become important criteria of differentiation. Information and messages could be tailored to various HCPs and distributed in a less vertically structured environment. Outcomes research may help inform patient-centered value perspective in messages. Also, in the increasingly collaborative provider environment, the patient, her advocates, caregivers, and multidisciplinary HCP teams (social workers, MDs, RNs, NPs) may become even more important audiences to consider. This is especially true for serious diseases where care typically crosses into different disciplines and healthcare settings.

The US healthcare system is changing at a rapid pace. Still, however, the innovative delivery systems that seek to balance quality, cost and access are still in their early phases of implementation. Staying on top of these developments to identify strategic opportunity and translating insights into value-driven communication is more important now than ever before. Proactivity and adaptability will be the defining characteristics of winners on the changing healthcare landscape.

1   http://images.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/AllscriptsVolumetoValue.pdf

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Aug23

Speed That Belies Size

Posted by Dan Chichester from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America

By Dan Chichester from Ogilvy Healthworld-NY, North America | Published: August 23, 2012

The interwebs sparks all sorts of great stories. Cat videos are awesome. Only boutique agencies “get” digital. And big agencies are only good for bloat.

We can all agree on the first. The latter two—well, as “Mortal Kombat” used to kick off its matches: Fight! Which is not to say there aren’t odd days in the quagmire week where machinery gets in the way. But more often, the potential of having a great many top folk in one place is its own advantage.

Rapid response can be assembled in short order. Properly motivated and target-focused, this is a critical mass of strategy, planning, creative, coders, UX, and more that can more than handle itself in the ring. And as in all good moments of fission, that time to reaction can really cook.

Just this last week the mobile group put together a 2-day hackathon. Thirty or so pros, many meeting for the first time, split into 5 teams across an equal number of brands.

Two days to learn about multiple capabilities in a new software development kit (SDK) from a leading telecomm vendor; conjure that fresh knowledge into a mobile app concept; push pixels and punch words to fit an appropriate number of screens, menus and assets; and program it out into a working prototype that had to impress a showcase session at the end of the second day.

Every group delivered sit-up-and-take-notice work. The results were a wowza gathering of mobile goodness across luxury and consumer packaged goods, financial and communication services—and from our corner, healthcare adherence.

Building on the tools offered by the SDK, the Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide team concepted an app that tracks a person’s pattern of behavior, uses location to assess health-positive and health-negative activities, and then provides the right level/tone of support to make sure they’re properly managing their condition through treatment.

These weren’t blue sky exercises. They are real apps, based on real insights, and they will be leveraged for real next steps with their respective brands.

Not bad for 16 hours. And more common than “big agency” is often credited with. Edgy and current is critical to digital thinking. But that’s not the sole province of “small & scrappy.” Mass can equal more talent, more discipline, more expertise and experience to kick into gear and kick it up a notch. On your next journey into digital, consider all your options.

But whatever else—trust me on the cat vids.

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Jul26

Native Content

Posted by Nancy Malaga from Ogilvy CommonHealth RedWorks- NJ, North America

By Nancy Malaga from Ogilvy CommonHealth RedWorks- NJ, North America | Published: July 26, 2012

Considering the Impact of Digital First

MIT is taking the lead recently, promoting a concept called “Digital First.” On the subject of Digital First, Jason Pontin, editor in chief of Technology Review, an MIT publication, is quoted as saying: “Henceforth…we’ll publish nothing first in print…We feel we can better serve our various audiences on electronic platforms…We can create more beautiful and interactive experiences, and create higher-value and unique advertising opportunities for agencies and their clients.” What I found refreshing about the idea of Digital First content is its dissociation with print. Distinct from, and neither secondary nor tied to print, native digital content can exist as a new and unique channel. A brave new digital world of native digital content is born with new opportunities for content providers as well as advertisers.

Enter the Paywall

Like any new frontier, unclaimed property will inspire the entrepreneur in any of us to place a stake. The paywall, a business model that proposes to charge for content on the web, has been gaining acceptance over the past year, thanks in part to the decline in newspaper and magazine revenue. The all-or-nothing paywall model used at The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London will charge for all content; the metered model will charge for only some content. For example, on The New York Times or Financial Times websites, free access shuts down after a certain number of articles per month. It is only a matter of months before trade publications like JAMA start metering.

Same Brand, New Content

Having enjoyed reading content on the web for free for many years, I originally rejected the idea of the paywall. These same content providers attempted to charge for content but failed during the earlier migration of content to the Internet in 2001. But as the concept of Digital First develops, the vision of new and exciting (interactive) content, replacing recycled “migrated content” may be worth paying for. Katelyn Watson, senior manager, Internet marketing at Shutterfly, agreed: “You know people are paying for a subscription, and you may even have access to data that tells you more about them. The quality of the inventory behind the paywall and the price an advertiser is willing to pay is probably better because of that,” she said.

Freedom From Advertising (We hope not!)

A recent survey by eMarketer indicates that 90% of readers who are willing to pay for content expect to find no ads on the other side of the paywall. If readers don’t reject ads altogether on paid content,  they may be more empowered to determine what advertising they want and how much they want. Or paid content could dissuade readers from reading content online, altogether. “If a consumer is paying for premium content and feels their information is being used to bombard them with ads, that’s going to make a bad situation worse, especially among people who already resent paying,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Time will tell as the concept of Digital First continues to unfold. As an editor, with only basic knowledge of marketing, native digital content (under the umbrella of Digital First), can provide a new channel for both content providers as well as advertisers. Unique, native digital content can optimize a brand by retaining existing customers and attracting new. Henceforth, revenue.

“Having a paywall opens up more opportunities for advertisers, for example, the ability to sponsor one-time access to the site on a cost-per-engagement basis. This makes for a much more robust and engaging brand experience than traditional banner advertising,” concluded Watson.

 

Sources:

www.technologyreview.com/view/428072/technology-review-goes-digital-first/

www.emarketer.com/%28S%28t1dbt545e1mlujiknbqcinbo%29%29/Article.aspx?R=1008294

www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009055

 

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