The Real Chemistry podcast connects the dots between guests and the innovative work they do to show up and shape the future of healthcare. Health data is medicine, and I was pleased to join Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of Seqster to discuss how we can break down health data silos and what that would mean for the future of healthcare.
Spurred by the pandemic, it’s safe to say that people are evaluating many facets of their lives. For me, this time at home has helped me appreciate special moments, such as our son’s first steps and word (“car” for those wondering), that have kept me positive and hopeful.
It’s also been a period where I’ve been able to take time for mindfulness, allowing for the discovery that I enjoy cooking even more than good takeout. Thankfully for my waistline, and in part from cool new tech like our Tempo home gym studio, it’s possible to more easily manage fitness goals from home.
By understanding what’s both possible and desirable, we can all take this time to think about what’s next and to achieve improvements. Like any good biological organism, we can accelerate our evolutionary adaptation.
In the ever-adapting marketplace, there are three big lines of progress that stand out for me because they have touched everybody and because they point to a future that promises better ahead – science, technology and communications.
With vision, innovation and commitment, these three lines can now be woven together to help companies and brands help deliver dramatically improved levels of health, wellbeing and resilience. We have the opportunity at last to reimagine health. Future posts will explore the progress that drives this vision of the future.
Looking forward to your thoughts and input along this ride.
The following is excerpted from an interview done by PharmaVoice magazine in May of 2020.
The marketing landscape of tomorrow will look much different as lines continue to blur between consultancies and agencies.
An April 2019 poll conducted by Digiday showed that 22% of client-side marketers planned to shift work from agencies to consulting firms. While the majority of respondents said they planned to remain with their agencies, the results show that consultancies are gaining traction with agencies’ clients. We spoke with leaders from the industry on both sides who have been instrumental in the transformation to a model that encompasses both the advisory role of a consultant and the creativity ability of an agency.
The basis for the move toward a combined offering from large consultancies is driven by the needs of today’s clients. As healthcare consumers expect more relationship building and custom interaction with the brands they choose, like they get from Amazon, for example, healthcare clients also need a service that provides consumers with a good experience along with a creative message and the data and technology to back the strategy up.
Clients need a partner that can manage complexity, activate a brand, create the experiences that surround that brand, and drive transformation. The ability to do all of this requires a new breed of agency partner — one that is part business consultancy, part creative agency, and part technology powerhouse.
The trend in healthcare marketing has been to move from a transactional, episodic relationship to one that’s much more relational and adaptive, notes Larry Mickelberg, managing director, life sciences agency lead at Deloitte Digital.
“This transformation is happening because in today’s healthcare ecosystem, business-as-usual marketing will fall short,” he says. “Today, it’s all about experience. Brands are using customer experience to facilitate a different type of engagement with audiences. And that engagement is really about a continuous, informed, and more humanistic approach to marketing.”
But agencies still have lessons they can learn from consultancies in terms of how to evolve their infrastructure and processes in order to enable omni-channel success, he adds.
The Emerging Hybrid Model
While our experts say there will most likely always be agencies and consultancies that operate separately, the services that some will offer will continue to blend until there is a hybrid model. At times, the two entities may continue to compete against each other, but there also will be many opportunities for partnerships. The need to fulfill consumer expectation of an experience with a brand will undoubtedly draw the two together.
In 2013, Accenture Interactive made its first move into agency territory by acquiring Fjord, a global design consultancy specializing in digital experiences and services. That was just the start, as over the next six years it acquired more than 30 agencies, the most notable being Droga5 last year, a 500-plus employee powerhouse with offices in New York and London.
Deloitte is another consulting firm that has established a digital marketing and design division in the past few years, through acquiring companies with capabilities such as building user experiences, digital marketing, design, and web and mobile development skills. In the United States, Deloitte bought the creative agency Heat in 2016 and before that had picked up several companies outside the U.S., including Acne, a creative agency; Market Gravity and Brandfirst, design companies; and CloudinIT, a professional services firm that helps customers implement Salesforce and Amazon web services systems.
“The lines are certainly blurring, but there are a couple of organizations – mine among them – that are one and the same in terms of what we do,” Mr. Mickelberg says. “When Deloitte leads a transformational business initiative for a client, the agency team can help to frame that in a compelling marketing story. And where the agency team brings strategic and creative marketing muscle from brand planning to creative execution, the Deloitte team backs it up with industry insight and proprietary tech and data analytics tools.”
Mr. Mickelberg says merging an agency within a consultancy requires more than bolting on services and trying to be all things to all people; rather it is a way to bridge the two worlds and create the future of marketing and advertising, he says.
Adding a creative digital unit to Deloitte was outside of its previous branding, so in an effort for synergy and brand building for the marketing arm, Deloitte created studios and a look for the agency side that is completely different than other Deloitte offices.
“Over the past couple of years we have been building brand recognition for Deloitte in this part of the market,” he says. “The studios — there are 48 of them around the world — are very creative, and the design is very funky; they’re super cool. They’re places where people want to do interesting, good creative work. We bring our clients through those studios so they can see a different side of Deloitte.”
What Separates Agencies and Consultancies
For ages, healthcare advertising and communications agencies have acted as de facto consultancies — brand stewards — providing strategic market insights, positioning, and guidance, and recently adding their own data and technology services to their arsenals. For example, last year, Publicis bought data-tech company Epsilon and IPG created Kinesso, a data-driven creative solutions engine. Earlier last year, there were rumors that PwC and WPP were in conversations to merge — nothing has transpired yet.
Nearly four years ago, a Forrester report determined that 76% of pharmaceutical brand marketers saw budgets for content marketing increasing. In 2016, creating and delivering campaigns was still the domain of lead advertising agencies, the report stated.
In 2017, four consultancies were in the top 10 of Ad Age’s ranking of the largest agency companies in the world. For the first time ever, the marketing services units of Accenture, PwC, IBM, and Deloitte ranked just below WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic, and Dentsu.
Nearly half of digital advertising agencies worldwide said clients moving services in-house was a key challenge they are facing, according to a December 2018 survey conducted by Marketing Land. One-fifth of respondents cited large consultancies as taking their business.
According to several 2019 eMarketer reports, advertising agencies have always operated in a competitive market, but now, they must cope with consultancies encroaching on their turf. eMarketer says ad agencies are fighting back by bolstering their strategic consulting and data integration offerings in an attempt to offer one-stop solutions.
Marketers will need partners who can bring to life experiences that connect and support HCPs, caregivers, and patients; empower the business to move at the speed and with the quality that customers expect; plan for the future health landscape in an increasingly diversified marketplace; and provide integrated services at scale, from designing and building customer experiences, to communicating and running them.
Is a Blended Model the Answer for the Future?
The future for marketing appears to be driven by customer-centricity, with brands focusing on delivering the best experience possible to their customers. This focus requires more than a great creative campaign; it also needs data, technology, and analytics that usually come from a consulting firm.
“In a more traditional sense, a consulting firm works on things like technology, architecture, marketing strategy, analytics, and process and then the agency works on the actual substance of the brand and the creative campaign,” Mr. Mickelberg says. “This is definitely an outmoded way of working.”
The growing interconnectivity between patients and their providers has really changed marketing’s role from just push messaging and advertising and promotion to one of creating a personalized health narrative that speaks directly to each patient’s unique needs across digital touchpoints. Marketers need to provide the information, support, or tools that consumers need, when they need them across the health journey.
All of us as consumers have experienced this type of connectivity in other parts of our lives when we interact with consumer and lifestyle companies, Mr. Mickelberg says. “These companies have created a different set of expectations for us as consumers that we now expect to see in other parts of our lives, including healthcare. Leading pharma companies are going to consider supplementing or replacing traditional agencies with new partners and new kinds of teams and platforms that are built around customer experience.”
Elements such as personalization, convenience, digital, real time, and value adds are all the things that healthcare marketing has to encompass to become as customer friendly as possible — and are expectations that will impact future marketing requirements.
Instead of traditional agencies, pharma companies will turn to more cross-functional groups that have strength in marketing, in technology, in media, and in science to shape culture, to drive advocacy, and to infuse brands with innovation, Mr. Mickelberg adds.
I was asked to comment on the findings of the MM+M Healthcare Marketer’s Trend Report, and following is the Q&A that was conducted with the publication in March of 2019.
The stars are shining brightly in the healthcare marketing universe. Advances in science and medicine and the growing connectivity between patients and providers is remaking healthcare. In concert, healthcare marketing is moving toward far more personalized narratives that speak directly to each audience’s unique needs. We’re helping more people feel acknowledged, understood, and included when it comes to matters of health.
We’re at the beginning of a monumental pivot, one in which we put human experience at the center of everything we do. In marketing, we’re turning data and platforms and untested abstractions into resonant content and brand engagement. That’s a real shift from where we’ve been in the past two decades — mass messaging, spray-and-pray, armies of sales reps beating down doctors’ doors.
This year’s exuberant survey results show the continued move to digital dominance, which is no surprise, with patient engagement and social media leading the way in channel growth and tactics such as marketing analytics and marketing AI posting some of the biggest percent increases. Some of the other building blocks of this pivot, such as big data, connecting the top, middle, and lower marketing funnels, and collaborations with health-tech entrants, still remain squarely in the challenge and opportunity space.
Yes, without a doubt. The goal is to create precision marketing ecosystems that can intelligently respond across the health journey to needs through sensing with data-rich insights, agile creative, and automated platforms working in concert to deliver resonant content and personalized experiences, with predictive analytics, machine learning and AI optimizing it all.
Marketers’ optimism and ambition and the growing embrace of new approaches, along with increased budgets, are the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats, right? For consultancies especially, it’s driven by the desire to shake up existing thinking and teams, with a major focus on marketing tech, data science, and machine learning.
For the moment, the survey data suggest marketers seem to be generally satisfied with their partners. But the trajectory we’re seeing has the potential to upend those traditional client/agency relationships. The sophistication of clients and teams on the marketing side is beginning to exceed some agencies’ capability to serve them. A real divergence is starting to happen. We started by talking about shining stars, but even those can run out of fuel and burn out.
I’m a pretty optimistic guy. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about change and dynamism in the marketplace because that’s been our reality for some time now. But one thing I have been thinking about is the moves in DC to end the tax deduction for DTC advertising, which would fundamentally change commercial economics.
If companies cannot deduct marketing expenses for DTC — not just TV, but print and social media and everything else — that changes the overall financial equation in big ways. Marketers will have to think differently about how they spend money. It will become a very different calculation for them. Then there will be the trickle down to agencies and their holding companies, who may find themselves in a challenging situation. It’s like a whack-a-mole — the issue seems to keep resurfacing and it’s hard to ignore the momentum.
AR and VR aren’t growing at the rate I expected. I was also taken by what seems to be a moderate decline in content marketing. Frankly, I wonder if brands and companies are using content marketing the right way.
As expectations grow and omnichannel experiences have become table stakes, content strategy is key to so many fundamental marketing concepts. In order to continue to meet and exceed service expectations and differentiate with creative and content across all channels and customer segments, cohesive content strategy is essential.
The key is identifying areas of white space where companies and brands can address unmet customer needs alongside baseline informational needs and to track with those needs over time — so when we personalize, we can address where in the journey a person is and serve the right content at the right time. Smart content marketing and related personalization schema are often the unseen engines behind successful platforms and campaigns.
I’ve been beating the pharma-marketers-are-laggards drum for my entire career, but our clients have improved the quality of their marketing. There’s been lots of turnover of chief marketing officers and chief digital officers, and they’ve been replaced with people from outside the industry. The caliber of people is profoundly different, and higher, than it was a few years ago.
There’s plenty to be encouraged by. Larger-scale bets are being made around marketing automation and training, and they’re going to pay off in spades. The general vibe is one of ambition. We’re at the beginning of a real generational shift. And those stars that burn out, well, their remnants shine on and seed future generations of stars, don’t they?
To read the complete MM&M/Deloitte Healthcare Marketers Trend Report 2019, click here.
From the March 01, 2019 Issue of MM&M – Medical Marketing and Media
Honored to take part in a PRWeek roundtable of elite healthcare communications executives at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. We spent a great day on healthcare challenges, technologies and emerging trends.
In February, I was invited to Google’s Cambridge, MA campus to speak at the Ad Club’s major health and wellness event, Vital Signs, alongside execs from such companies as Aetna, Shire, Cleveland Clinic, and others.
Vital Signs is a half-day conference focusing on the latest trends and marketing innovations in the health & wellness industries. The agenda covered the topics that are driving major changes in the health and wellness industry from the shift to consumerism, from the importance of wellness, to the reinvention of primary care. We explored the innovative use of technology, mobile, and content to engage consumers and medical professionals.
At the end of 2017, for the fifth year in a row, and for the first time with Deloitte Digital, my team has been recognized by the editors at PM360 Magazine as an Innovator company in the healthcare space.
This recognition is an important reminder how important it is to take risks, move quickly, and upend existing business models and notions. Our work at Deloitte Digital is aimed at helping brands transform their approach to marketing so that they can be more effective in delivering a great customer experience. See the editors’ entry below:
Life Sciences Agency
Deloitte Digital
Larry Mickelberg, Managing Director and Agency Lead
In the past, agency was an outside business specialized in creating top-down brand messaging driven by understanding health conditions and the products and services that treat them. Today, agency is a collaborative, cross-team, horizontal approach to creating coherent and compelling customer experiences, shaped by holistic understanding of patient journeys with their varied touchpoints, lifestyles, and emotional triggers.
Deloitte felt that life sciences companies and brands needed to change their approach to marketing—and to agencies—to achieve this, and set about creating something new to help life sciences marketers be effective and efficient in reaching customers beyond the traditional, transactional marketing model. So, five years ago they created Deloitte Digital, a creative digital consultancy, and just this past year that unit launched a new life sciences agency business.
Deloitte Digital is able to move the healthcare agency business ahead with the pace of industry change through expertise in design, connectivity, data intelligence, automation, exponential technologies, experience innovation, marketing agility, the cloud, and more. They are working with clients to re-wire healthcare marketing, adopting customer-centric approaches and transformative new digital engagement and campaign models to accelerate innovation and drive improved health outcomes.
For example, they work with leading tech platforms to imagine, deliver, and run a cutting-edge patient engagement platform that is used by patients to help track their well-being and connect them with their care team, other patients, and even pharma. As well, teams in their brand-new NYC creative studio are working with next-generation technologies to create entirely new kinds of content, brand stories, and immersive health experiences.
At the end of 2017, I was invited by Salesforce to deliver a keynote address at their massive conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco. (session video at link)
Extremely honored to be recognized by PR Week and MM&M as #21 on their 2017 list of the top 50 influencers in health. This is important work at a very exciting time in the industry, as advances in medicine and technology forever alter our health experience. Hat tip to my fellow honorees and below is the release put out by Deloitte Digital.
Deloitte Digital’s Larry Mickelberg Named to ‘Health Influencer 50’ List in PRWeek and Medical Marketing & Media
NEW YORK, Nov. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Deloitte announced today that Larry Mickelberg, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Deloitte Digital’s life sciences agency lead, has been named to the “Health Influencer 50” list by PRWeek and Medical Marketing & Media (MM&M). This is the second year PRWeek and MM&M have collaborated on selecting the industry’s top 50 power players in the health sector. The annual list honors professionals that have transformed the health care industry’s reputation and elevated patient stories with brand marketing. Both PRWeek and MM&M will release special features on each of the honorees in their November 2017 print issues.
“Larry has spent the last 15 years bringing his unique viewpoint and leadership to an impressive array of health and life science-focused brands,” said Andy Main, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and head of Deloitte Digital U.S. “For the industry to recognize someone who is not just selling, but building brands by focusing on customer experiences, is a testament to Larry’s breadth of knowledge and the deep talent he brings to every client enagement. We couldn’t be more proud to have him on our team.”
At Deloitte Digital, Mickelberg is building a new kind of digital agency for life sciences, and oversees agency and creative teams at the intersection of digital, health care and marketing. Before Deloitte Digital, he served as chief digital officer at Havas Health, a leading global health care agency network, where he was also the president of the Havas Lynx US agency.
Mickelberg has spoken at numerous industry events and contributes experience to major industry and trade publications, such as HuffingtonPost, Advertising Age, Adweek, MediaPost, PM360 and MM&M, among others.
Visit healthinfluencer50.com to read Mickelberg’s full profile.
Following is an excerpt from a recent Q&A for the Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today, talking about the shift to value-based, data-driven, customer-centered marketing for Life Sciences companies. Full article here.
“…For health care companies, digital technologies present the opportunity to improve patient care, deliver better outcomes, and make the patient experience more personalized. In this Q&A, Mickelberg discusses how marketers can pursue this goal and which capabilities can help them achieve it.
What high-level trends are affecting companies in the health care industry?
Mickelberg: Several disruptive forces—in science, business, technology, and communications—are transforming the industry. In science, therapies are becoming much more personalized, for example, with genetic mapping enabling treatments at the genotype level. On the business and regulatory front, ongoing health care reform continues to highlight costs, reimbursements, and patient outcomes. Increasingly, companies are relying on real-world evidence to demonstrate value to payers and patients as well as develop improved therapies more quickly. In technology, innovations such as health sensing are changing the way health care is delivered. Last, in communications, perceptual interfaces, such as conversational user interface, and immersive displays, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, are changing the nature of health care experiences.
How is marketing evolving in response to these shifts?
Overall, health care marketing is moving toward being more value-based, data-driven, and customer experience-focused. For the past two decades, it has relied on mass messaging in direct-to-consumer campaigns—the one-size-fits-all, spray-and-pray approach. But we no longer live in a mass marketing world; consumers typically expect more personalized interactions where and when it’s convenient for them. For marketers, the challenge is to tailor messages to individuals and their particular health conditions. To do this, many companies are focusing on data—patient analytics and techniques such as predictive modeling—to fuel a new level of connectedness and intimacy throughout the health journey. The goal is to create an effective, enduring, personalized health narrative built for a multiscreen, multidevice world—to provide consumers beneficial experiences regardless of where they are in their journey.
Which technologies hold the most potential for health care companies and their marketing efforts?
Embedded sensors, the internet of things, cloud-based analytics, and artificial intelligence are already having a significant effect. They generate—and enable marketers to leverage—data to address very specific needs. Consider targeted drug therapies, which are precision medicines that home in on specific molecules. By using companion diagnostics and sensors on wearable or portable devices, it’s possible to track the drug’s physiological effects. This type of data flow was previously available primarily for patients in clinics and hospitals, but with cloud-based analytics, it’s possible to create comprehensive health and well-being profiles for individuals, available in the moment. Ultimately, data can help people make better health-related decisions in medical settings, but also at home, when shopping or eating at restaurants, and elsewhere. It also enables health care companies to tailor their efforts in several ways. For example, they can use data to segment patients based on which treatments are likely to work best, or apply predictive algorithms to monitoring data to anticipate health needs and respond in real time.
What capabilities can health care marketers develop to gain competitive advantage?
First, data intelligence is critical, because the real value is in applying data, not just having it. For health care marketers, that means exploring advanced cognitive technologies and analytics and using data from those efforts to create more engaging communications. Being intelligent about data also means working internally and with partners to build sound cybersecurity programs. Given the nature of health data and concerns about hacking, this is particularly important.
Experience innovation—a second vital capability—involves considering how all these new technologies can create better engagement. Many consumers seek personalized, meaningful health care interactions, and the marketers that can deliver such experiences likely will be best positioned for competitive advantage. Third, creative and applied design capabilities are more valuable than ever. Informed by data and behavioral insights, creative entails much more than copy and art. It includes, for example, experience blueprints, rich content, and “intelligent” ad campaigns, with innovations such as chatbots and digital avatars as part of the brand experience.
Fourth, becoming more agile as an organization is important—being able to build, measure, learn, and adapt much more quickly than in the past. It’s this agility that can help marketers engage consumers in the moment. And last, having a superior ecosystem of partners is critical. Companies don’t have to go it alone; they can work with vendors, customers, suppliers, partners, and service providers to co-design more meaningful, rewarding experiences.
For marketers, now is the time to develop these capabilities; they are the tools that can enable highly tailored, value-driven marketing. The industry is now planning for the next-generation drug launches of 2020. The days of using just mass media—commercials of people walking on a beach holding hands—are far behind us.”
#LM 