City of Paris

If you are looking to jump-start your knowledge about the new connectivity, how it is reshaping communications among your customers, competitors, champions and adversaries and, more important, how it is demanding that marketers rethink healthcare communications, this is the book for you.

Put simply, open dialogue, enabled by the Internet, is energizing a free flow of information. Happy customers, disgruntled customers, people worried about their health, people reaching out for support, people offering a helping hand–they are all on the Internet, chatting, podcasting, blogging, responding to polls, self-publishing and otherwise making themselves heard, in text, audio or video messages. Against this backdrop of open, uncensored dialogue, how do we as marketers manage our messages? How do we learn from this unfettered chatter? How do we harness the energy of enthusiastic champions? How do we quell dissenters? And all of this applies not only to the external world of customers, business partners, competitors, shareholders and regulators, but also the microcosm within your organization.

Li and Bernoff make learning easy for the reader with their engaging style and case studies from different industry sectors—including oncology and obesity—back by facts and figures. Soon you’ll leave the world of inactives and spectators and find yourself among the joiners, collectors, critics and creators. Read it and let me know if you agree.

Our poll, which was posted on the City of Paris website from September 8 through September 21, tries to get at what’s influencing creativity in healthcare communications today. A resounding 60% of you believe that the client is the most important factor in determining the quality of the creative product. A third of you believe that it’s the agency. A minority of votes pointed in the direction of budget, regulatory constraints or brand strategy.

So what about the client? How does the client influence creativity? According to comments on the blog:

1. Clients need to do their homework, be clear about the value proposition and messages to their customers. In most cases, this is the weakest link in the chain. True, it is a partnership between client and agency, and the qualified agency is often a strong contributor to the strategy development process. But homework and thinking are not something a client can delegate.
2. Clients need to set expectations and demand exemplary work. One caveat though. The right to set expectations is earned by laying the strategic groundwork and investing in time and energy to communicate and share your knowledge, insight and strategy with your agency team. You can’t credibly demand good work until you’ve demonstrated that you’ve done your fair share. And the agency team needs the basic information and directions to get started.
3. A sense of conviction and trust in your own judgment are critical when it comes to selling management and other stakeholders within your company on creative work that may deviate from what is expected. Once again, it comes back to homework and strategy grounded in solid understanding of your customer when it comes time to defend the agency’s work, which is also your work if you’ve followed rules 1 and 2 above. Too often, I have watched clients worry more about trying to appeal to their management rather than their customers. Well, management is already sold on the company’s products (most of the time, anyway).
4. A healthy working relationship with the agency is a pre-requisite to good agency work. Agency teams will go out on a limb for clients that they respect and like – that’s human nature, isn’t it? But, remember, being liked is not enough. The effective client is also respected.

What about the agencies? The comments on our blog offered some suggestions.

1. The same advice about doing the homework applies to the agency team, especially when it comes to products involving complex science. There really is no short cut. Now, that does not mean that everyone on the creative team needs to have a science degree, but someone on the team should understand the underlying science and communicate it clearly to the team in simple terms. This is an arduous process but a necessary investment. Equally important is the insight into the customer – who he or she is as a person, what his or her aspirations and fears are, and how he or she accesses and processes information.
2. Put substance before style. For agency professionals, showmanship is a valued skill. But the danger lies in investing the time in executing the concept for presentation purposes rather than in coming up with new and fresh ideas. And with computer-generated art and desktop publishing, it is tempting for art directors to start comping before investing enough energy in ideation.
3. Agency management needs to rethink how talent is recruited, nurtured and deployed. There is no quick answer to the shortage of seasoned agency professionals, in part due to the lack of willingness of young talent to stay put in jobs the way the previous generation did. And what about the dilemma presented by veteran professionals whose experience we value but who have been slow to adapt to changes in the way we work?
4. That same sense of conviction and inner confidence we are advocating for the client is even more important in the case of agencies. And once again, the agency that has done its homework and can back the creative work with thoughtful rationale and solid facts will stand a much better chance of getting the buy-in.

What do you think? Post your comments. Would you like to participate in a roundtable discussion (a mix of agency and client professional) to talk about how we can raise the bar on creativity together? Send me a note and I’ll make sure you’re included.

Some time ago, when I was working on an annual report for a point-of-care diagnostics start-up, the CEO of the company lamented to me that clinical diagnostics was just not getting a fair share of the healthcare dollar, and the relatively low standing of clinical diagnostics, compared to pharmaceuticals and therapeutic devices, was reflected in company valuation. The year was 1993, and healthcare reform was all the rage. This CEO (and a very successful serial entrepreneur, I might add) explained that the percentage of healthcare expenditures spent on clinical diagnostics was dropping rapidly, from 11 percent to 9 percent to 7 percent at the time.

That comment was one of those eye openers that stayed with me. Over the years, I’ve spoken to many executives in the diagnostics industry and asked them about this rather disconcerting trend. Everyone agrees that the value of diagnostics is not properly recognized; everyone agrees that some awareness building among all healthcare stakeholders would be beneficial; but companies and industry groups alike have taken relatively little action. A quick search uncovered a well-stated summary on Roche Diagnostics’ website at http://www.roche.com/health_economics_e.pdf. The industry group Advanced Medical Technology Association (Avamed) offers a number of position papers and case studies documenting the value of diagnostics in healthcare at http://www.advamed.org/MemberPortal/About/Resources. Abbott Diagnostics is sponsoring a global program (”Labs are vital”) to celebrate the role of laboratory professionals. But that was about it. While many diagnostic product stories are told around how the test can improve health outcomes, and, notably, molecular diagnostics companies are building their stories around targeted therapy, personalized medicine and the like, the diagnostics industry has yet to realize the value of its products and claim its place in healthcare delivery. Not surprisingly, only 4 percent of healthcare dollars are spent on diagnostic services today, and laboratory diagnostics accounts for only 1 percent.

The pharma vs. diagnostics contrast is especially ironic in personalized medicine. Arguably, personalized medicine represents a convergence of diagnostics and therapeutics, and perhaps a major opportunity for redefining the value of diagnostics. Yet, none of the top revenue-generating targeted therapies today (e.g., Herceptin®, Erbitux® and Gleevec®) is associated with a single, exclusive, branded diagnostic test. Are diagnostics companies so eager to maximize revenue from clinical trials that they are missing the opportunity to negotiate a more equitable partnership or exclusivity? Are diagnostics companies shortchanging themselves by selling test kits for clinical trial use rather than taking an equity stake? Should a diagnostics company be a vendor to the pharma company, or should it insist on a partnership role? Of course, with partnership comes risk sharing, and the hefty investment in clinical trials can be a deterrent. And so the value of diagnostics continues to be defined by pharma and payers who continue to find “bargains” in laboratory testing.

I was chatting with colleagues in the healthcare communication business the other day, marveling at the breakthroughs in science and medicine over the past two decades and feeling fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a part of these new developments as we work with clients to bring innovations to the marketplace. Then one of them, a writer, said wistfully, “You know, I get so excited about new developments. And I feel such a sense of accomplishment when I am able to communicate their significance in my writing. Yet when I open up the publications read by the very scientists and clinicians who are leading this innovation, I feel that the advertising is not up to par. I see a lot of the same stale ideas, staid execution, and a lot of talking at rather than conversing with customers in the advertising. It’s as though time stood still for our industry.”

Are we, as marketers and marketing communication professionals, standing still while our counterparts in research, development and clinical practice are fast-forwarding? Is it true that advertising professionals—who build their livelihood on creativity and innovation—are lagging in the very areas in which they are expected to excel? How did this happen?

It seems that the first place to look is in the advertising agencies. Have they fallen flat on their faces? In the past few months, I have sat through several agency pitches as a search consultant. Based on the work I saw at the pitches, I have to say that the caliber of agencies today is certainly not worse—and probably better—than it was ten years ago. There is a consistent focus on the strategy development process, although there are various degrees of rigor in the process and not all embrace the integration of audience research. The creative teams are talented and experienced. With few exceptions, they are able to articulate the strategy behind their work. Yet I noticed that much of the work that the agencies are most proud of is either old work or unpublished work that they wish they had run. Why is that? What has changed?

It is certainly possible that clients are less willing to take risks. There may be a general belief among clients that it is best to play it safe with tried and true approaches rather than take the chance of losing the audience—or even worse inviting their scorn. As a result, creative work tends to be more predictable and less edgy.

Then there is the issue of branding. Branding has become a catchword—poorly understood and often confused with image and design consistency. Logos, colors, grids, color bars and other graphic devices, neatly packaged in so-called communication and design guidelines, have priority over value proposition and messages. Too often these guidelines are treated as brand guidelines and become the primary if not only focus in evaluating communication pieces. Certainly, it’s much easier to manage tangibles such as “Is the logo the right size and correctly placed?” than “Are we delivering the appropriate message to our audience effectively?” We hear about “logo police” at the corporate level, but where are the “message police”? I know one company that specifies “No people photographs in ads” in their guidelines. Although design consistency is a powerful tool for unifying visually discordant communications from different divisions of a large company, is it what customers hold most dear?

Tell us what you think.