Marcus Thomas, a leader in healthcare marketing, has spent over a decade shaping impactful campaigns for brands at the intersection of technology and wellness. Chatting with Jill Lewis, SVP / Group Account Director, we delve into the unique challenges healthcare marketers face—from HIPAA compliance to the balancing act of MLR reviews—and the innovative solutions they’re using to overcome them.
Please provide an overview of the clients and categories you work with in the healthcare and or wellness space. What kind of media channels are you using?
Marcus Thomas established a health and wellness practice 10 years ago. Our current roster includes clients in med tech, wearable technology, primary and pediatric care, concussion therapy, and diabetes management.
We typically target both patients and healthcare practitioners (HCPs) and leverage a 360-degree approach with lots of data to get our messages to the right people at the right time along their healthcare journey – from prescription data to AI-driven contextual ads that meet our patients across all their devices, wherever they happen to be. The data available to us is pretty incredible. For instance, we have access to NPI-level data that tells us what a doctor specializes in, who they see and what drugs or devices they prescribe, so we are able to get very specific and personal with our communication. We reach our HCP audience across in-office channels like drug portals, electronic health record (EHR) platforms and peer-to-peer social platforms like Sermo. We also reach HCPs when they’ve shed their white coats and are in their blue jeans, sometimes with strategically placed out-of-home messages acknowledging they’re leaving the practice/clinic/hospital and also with our consumer advertising.
What challenges do they face in marketing, and how are you positioning brand narratives? (Please provide work or case studies, if available!)
Of course, HIPAA plays a significant role when working with healthcare clients. Another challenge for several of our clients in this space is that all work must go through an intense MLR (Market Legal Review), which is a further limitation on how we tell brand stories with a competitive edge. We’ve found a good deal of success in building communities of users and bringing them forward in advertising to tell the brand story for us. Allowing the consumers to tell their authentic experience allows us much more flexibility in what can be said, since it’s not coming directly from the brand.
The same principles of brand positioning apply, regardless of category, in that it must be authentic to the brand and grounded in a customer truth.
Akron Children’s Hospital was outspent by some serious competition vying to be a parent’s first choice for pediatric care. To set them apart, we went beyond the benefit of physical health and celebrated the holistic approach to having healthy children, based on the insight that today’s generation of parents view social, emotional and mental health as important as the physical. Our “More childhood, please.®” campaign has cemented Akron Children’s Hospital as the premier pediatric provider in the market.
Given the growing market for wearables and overall innovation in consumer health, what are the opportunities for healthcare brands? Is new technology and social media helping people move to better health?
The growing wearable trend is helping consumers take control of their own health and in some cases helps facilitate conversations with their doctors. One of our clients is a brand of continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a connected device for people with diabetes. As GLP-1s have become more popular for treating type 2 diabetes and obesity, people are using CGMs to monitor their insulin levels and having greater success in lowering their A1C. The wearable allows the patient to have a better understanding of how different factors affect their glucose, and it allows them to make more informed decisions day-to-day.
As for the role of social media, there’s undoubtedly a game-changing level of access to health education and community support that social spaces create. At the same time, it’s important for marketers to remain aware of the ways in which social media can have harmful side effects too, particularly when it comes to mental health among vulnerable or pediatric populations.
What trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on your clients in the next few years?
I believe technology will continue to have a significant impact on healthcare. Connected devices continue to be developed, which poses new competitive threats and introduces new ways for people to interact with healthcare brands. Some of the technology giants, like Apple and Google, are integrating more and more specialized health trackers into their devices, making clients think more expansively about the value they provide to their customers and consider more strategic partnerships. The more devices speak to each other and the more access to information grows, the more we’re reminded as marketers to mirror the trends: stay interconnected, pursue new sources of insight, and be immediate with your impact.