A patient waiting in a cold, crowded doctor's office might not feel particularly chatty. But she's likely to feel a lot more friendly seated at her computer in the comfort of her home. Direct talked recently with Larry Mickelberg, executive vice president at Digitas Health in Philadelphia, to get his take on how social networking and search are shaping the online healthcare marketing landscape.
DIRECT: Are there any niches in healthcare direct marketing where you're seeing particular growth?
MICKELBERG: Some really innovative and great ideas are happening in oncology and now that those products are coming to market, it follows that marketers are experimenting with interesting ways to help make them successful.
DIRECT: Is oncology services marketing directed more toward the professional or consumer side?
MICKELBERG: At the end of the day, in our space almost everything clients do marketing-wise is geared around doctor-patient consultations. It's really a series of tightly integrated steps on both sides of the equation to get [patients] to the moment of truth. In oncology, on the consumer side, we've been seeing a lot of focused search activity and social media. Remember, here you don't have large patient populations. You have very narrow niche audiences you're trying to reach with any given product.
DIRECT: Are you seeing a lot of social networking activity in the healthcare space?
MICKELBERG: We're seeing some, but in my opinion not enough. Earlier this year, we did a study of healthcare marketers with CBI Research. We asked if they used Web 2.0 channels in their personal lives. Then later in the interview, we asked the same people whether these tactics were part of their marketing plans. Across the board, by almost a 2-1 margin, the very same people who were using these tools personally were not using them professionally. It was pretty shocking — around the agency we started calling it “the relevance gap.”
DIRECT: Why do you think there's a hesitancy? Are they unsure how to judge the ROI?
MICKELBERG: I don't think [the stereotype] of there being a reticence to embrace innovation in marketing is necessarily true. First, everything is just happening so fast. Marketers across industries are struggling with the pace of channel proliferation and the change in consumer consumption behavior. Second — and perhaps more meaningful — is that there's been continued uncertainty around legal and regulatory risks in these new channels. In most cases pharmaceutical companies — and the folks at the FDA — haven't had a chance to rule on the various issues and hurdles around these channels. For example, adverse events reporting is probably the single biggest bane of pharmaceutical marketing. A pharmaceutical company has a duty to react and respond to any sort of adverse event — for example, a drug interaction or a side effect — that it hears about. If the company picks up an adverse event because of a two-way communication, that triggers an enormous administrative process. But the fact is, that sort of reporting isn't new. The protocol and processes exist in channels like call centers to handle this kind of reporting. We think many of our clients just haven't contemplated that yet. Now if a brand started its own blog, for example, or God forbid, if a brand marketer was commenting in another blog, that would be a regulatory problem for pharmaceutical.
DIRECT: Do you think consumers expect — and want — pharma companies to be in the social networking space?
MICKELBERG: We live in a world where there's a 24-hour news cycle. Consumers want to be updated on emerging developments, as they happen, in any part of their lives. Yet our clients are committed to campaign development and approval cycles that are predicated on three to four message cycles per year. I don't know how long our clients can survive the disparity between customers' expectations and the reality of the way they plan. I think that mindset has to shift. They simply need to listen to the marketplace. We have frank and rich and valuable interactions happening every day in the social Web — blogs, message boards and [the like]. If our clients do nothing more in social media for the next couple of years other than listen and learn from their customers, they'll be light years ahead of where they are now.
DIRECT: So should they just sit back and listen?
MICKELBERG: No. The good news is that they also don't simply have to be a mute presence. They can and should engage. For one of our clients that markets an oncology product for women with breast cancer we created a social networking tool that allows family, friends and loved ones to create paper dolls as tributes to women in their lives who have survived breast cancer. They can personalize a doll with attributes that relate to the particular woman's being — her sense of courage and character or sense of humor or style, or any number of different definitions of this woman. Then they can send it to the woman and others, creating a chain. We've seen thousand and thousands of these dolls created with virtually no promotion. [The campaign] is truly viral and truly personal — but also truly global. It's not really a two-way channel, but it does let people co-create and get involved with the brand and what it stands for in the market.
DIRECT: How does search fit into the picture?
MICKELBERG: There's so much latent interest in healthcare topics on the Internet. If direct marketers simply respond to the queries that are happening by the millions each day then we're doing a service to the overall market. Eight out of 10 Internet users in the United States go online for health information. That's about 150 million people in the U.S., 8 million on a typical day. And more than 140 million citizens of the European Union are joining them every year. That's pretty profound.
DIRECT: What types of terms are typically searched?
MICKELBERG: There are several stages over the course of a health condition where people are searching, so the way they search changes. It starts with information about a symptom and then moves on to a specific condition, to treatment options and specific brands. The life cycle and the responses to those queries has to be carefully managed. It's not just about sending people to a “Brand.com” page no matter what they're asking. It's a landscape of branded, unbranded and third-party sites, social involvement and tools that differ from product to product, category to category, and customer to customer.
