This post was created in partnership with Doceree
Key takeaways
- To avoid campaigns that feel stale, marketers need to create an infrastructure they can build on and pivot from.
- When bringing AI into the mix, ensuring the technology addresses a specific problem is key.
- Investing in technology remains important, but it also needs to underscore an agency’s value to its clients.
Today’s healthcare marketers are embracing AI’s analytical capabilities in an effort to move toward new models that build stronger links from signals into relevant message delivery and measurable outcomes.
During an ADWEEK House Advertising HQ group chat co-hosted with Doceree, healthcare marketing leaders discussed how their internal infrastructure is changing to support greater intelligence tools and new methodologies that deliver better results for clients.
Finding success with interconnected teams
Kamya Elawadhi, co-founder and president of Doceree, kicked off the discussion by recognizing that traditional marketing campaigns may be outdated once they run.
“By the time we get approvals, and by the time we actually launch the campaigns, the audience that we started off planning has changed their behavior. It’s six-month-old target files or data that we are trying to plan against,” Elawadhi said.
But with the right infrastructure, healthcare marketers can rely less on time-based or orchestrated journeys, explained Alex Farber, VP of business development with Real Chemistry. She described how her agency did some campaign testing for a client that needed to funnel unique content journeys across multiple audience segments.
“What we found in these campaigns was that we were able to leverage the real-time data signals we were receiving in order to gain instant real-time learning so we were able to pivot and optimize,” she explained. “And if a physician started in one journey but ended in another journey, it was OK.”
Jose Ferreira, chief product officer for CMI Media Group, shared a similar experience. His team’s hypothesis was that media delivered in a narrative-based approach would drive better results.
“We’ve seen that in test-and-control scenarios, something like 5-to-1 or greater ROI when we’re leveraging that approach vs. more of a siloed traditional approach to target those customers,” he said.
Fannie McWatt, PhD, head of data and AI strategy for Publicis Health, attributed the success of one of her agency’s most successful Super Bowl campaigns to interconnectivity. The idea for the campaign, “Relax Your Tight End,” to promote prostate cancer screening was sparked by a conversation between Publicis Health’s chief medical officer and a doctor who said patients would be more likely to screen if they realized it was a blood test.
“That insight then led to thinking about audiences, thinking about different segments, how men behave in their healthcare journeys, and then led to the creative insight and the media strategy,” she said.
Weaving technology and AI into workflow
Adopting technology for technology’s sake can be a costly endeavor, which is why the panelists stressed the importance of identifying the problems they want the tools to solve before forcing implementation.
“How do you put those safeguards in place and make sure that people are thinking about the end goal of their technology usage and not just, ‘It’s cool, it’s fun, it’s different, and it saves me time on some slides’?” posed Farber. “What do we want out of it as a work product and how can it better benefit our clients?”
The panel also emphasized the need to keep humans in the loop, with McWatt warning against treating people like data points.
“In the end, what we’re doing is delivering on human needs, and you have to make sure that whatever your solution is, it has to be a human solution,” she said.
Keeping pace with and staying open to new developments can also help agencies set themselves apart.
“Nobody knows where the industry is heading. What was interesting and new last year has completely changed and evolved,” said Elawadhi, going from talking about prompt engineering to navigating and training agents.
Today’s media agencies, tomorrow’s tech organizations
The panelists agreed that technology infrastructure investments will be necessary to keep agencies relevant.
“The legacy model of selling the experts is probably not going to be the business model that gets supported five years from now or even three years from now,” warned Ferreira.
Clients really expect to see the value of business output, added Elawadhi.
“It’s no longer about whether or not your technology fits with my technology,” Elawadhi explained. “It’s about what value you are able to add to my client, and if you’re not able to convert that value to an ROI or dollar value, agency partners will not prioritize you over others.”
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