Applying Comms Planning to Healthcare
10 Lessons Learned From My Time in Pharma Advertising
I’ve heard it said that pharma advertising, strategically speaking, lags behind the trends and best practices of consumer advertising. To counter that, the teams that we work with touch both pharma and consumer accounts.
After all, your Pfizer customer might also simultaneously be your M&M customer. The general comms planning principles don’t change. And including comms planning is a must for guiding multi-channel marketing and creative effectiveness.
Here are some ways that I’ve found success applying comms planning to healthcare.
Build distinct brand elements, and use the same for HCPs and patients.
Distinct assets build brands. This is especially important for the time-strapped, information-burdened consumers of the pharmaceutical world. Once in the doctor’s office, they may just know they want to have a conversation about “the little blue pill” or “the giant with the flu.” There, it’s important for both doctors and patients to have the same reference point and that’s where distinct assets come in.
Create emotional work that connects with people on a human level.
Given the restrictions that healthcare must work within, it often feels that creativity can be constricted. But we believe that, at the end of the day, emotional, creative work is what drives successful advertising. You can read more here and here.
Longform video is our huge new opportunity.
The next “shiny new thing” is actually a very simple storytelling technique- long form video (read more here.) Videos longer than 60 seconds are seen as “content” and can have incredible effects on awareness, message recall, and shares. Not only that, channels like YouTube and Facebook have custom video modules that relieve videos themselves from having to include ISIs.
Re-think broad media and traditional channels.
We understand that many pharma clients, the audience is quite small. But as we see consumer advertising shift their media back towards the merits of broad-reaching TV, we expect that our pharma clients will soon do the same.
Create custom creative for each channel.
Consumers watch video, for example, differently when they’re watching TV vs. YouTube vs. Facebook. Not only does one size not fit all in those channels, research from the Advertising Research Foundation has shown that campaigns that use custom ads see a 31% increase in positive consumer sentiment AND a 57% increase in ROI.
Make display better with simpler banners.
Working with the IAB, BBDO’s Jordan Weil developed a simpler approach to better, more distinct banners. We call it the “Banner B.E.A.T.” And when it comes to mobile banners, we make those even simpler. Scrolling ISI is certainly an exception to the rules outlined there, but the general principles apply to the real estate we can control.
Change the way you do creative testing.
Studies have shown that “Intermediate effects of advertising such as brand awareness, image, and other measures of consumer brand health, do not correlate reliably with business performance.” Thus, we recommend that if a client is performing creative testing, they account for both “System 1” and “System 2" thinking offered by an increasing number of vendors, including Millward Brown, Nielsen, BrainJuicer, and Hall & Partners.
Developing frameworks collaboratively and include both paid and owned.
Get all the teams from all the agencies together to share their experiences. Align on your overall communications goal (which can apply to multiple targets), strategy and creative. Then move in to the real barriers that are preventing you from achieving your communication goal and how you will overcome them with communication, paid media, and owned assets. Set one person in charge (the comms planner) to lead the discussion and consolidate the thinking.
Identify the whole patient journey, but narrow in on what you can really affect with communications and media.
Brands do not need to communicate along every step of the way, especially when budgets are limited. Use your communications goal and consumer barriers as a guide for where your energy will be best spent, and where your brand can have the biggest change.
Keep it human-friendly.
In your internal documents and external communications, reduce jargon and write so that the average person can completely comprehend your intention. This is especially important when we’re writing for cross-agency collaboration. More human means less confusion. And because people respond to images of people (ex: this study about mobile phone visuals and faces), we want to keep our communications people-friendly too.
