• Healthline Walks A Line In Social Media
    Social media is an especially tricky environment for a high-regulated industry like pharmaceutical. At the same time, social networks and online communities have become important information sources for consumers and patients dealing with serious medical conditions. Speaking on a panel at MediaPosts Marketing: health conference Monday, David Kopp, EVP/ GM of Healthline, which operates a network of health sites and provides online marketing, said the company hasn’t run into a lot of FDA issues in social media because it runs communities on sites like Facebook in a safe and moderated way. “We don’t push pharma into the conversation,” he said. …
  • For HealthCare Brands, Clear Messages Are Key
    Product complexity is a particular challenge for healthcare marketers, as illustrated during a conversation at MediaPost's Marketing Health conference on Monday. "You don't want to confuse your audience," said Gaurav Bhatia, VP and Digital Strategy at AARP Services. The solution is to "keep the message simple and consistent across all [media] channels." Not so, said Dave Lockwood, Group Director of Solutions Planning at Lowe Campbell Ewald. The industry, Lockwood said, is "long past the days of a single message across channels." Single message or not, achieving simplicity requires "a lot of ingenuity," said Mark DiMassimo, CEO and Founder of DiMassimo …
  • Can Social Media Solve Healthcare's Image Problem?
    As an industry, healthcare is one of the least trusted among consumers, according to Kriste Goad, Chief Marketing Officer at ReviveHealth, a heathcare-focused communications shop. That presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities when approaching social media, Goad told attendees of MediaPost's Marketing Health conference on Monday. Combined with liability and regulatory concerns, healthcare marketers have been understandably slow to adopt social media, Goad said. Industry leaders, however, are missing a big opportunity to engage consumers with doctors and nurses, who happen to be some of the most trusted service professionals nationwide.
  • 169M Reasons To Invest In Healthy Online Content
    How big is the market for healthcare content, online? Well, on a monthly basis, about 169 million U.S. consumers view some sort of health-related material, according to David Shronk, Vice President of comScore's Digital Health Vertical. Give or take, that's about 70% of all domestic digital consumers, he said during his afternoon keynote at MediaPost's Marketing Health conference in Washington, D.C. The big story, however, is mobile, said Shronk. In fact, 1-in-2 pieces of healthcare content is now viewed via mobile device, while comScore expects mobile usage minutes to surpass desktop usage minutes, this year. For consumers, it all comes …
  • How ID Media Geo-Fenced Sleepless Shift Workers
    Interpublic's ID Media faced several challenges when trying to market Nuvigil -- a new drug for "Shift work disorder." For one, no one knew that SWD was a real disorder, according to Michael Baliber, SVP and Director of Media Strategy at Interpublic's ID Media. Therefore, "It required more of a push strategy than a pull strategy," he told attendees of MediaPost's Marketing Health Conference on Monday. Another issue was finding the estimated 900,000 clinical sufferers of SWD, which is understood to occur when one's work schedule is out of sync with their body's internal "sleep-wake" clock. The message (more or …
  • ObamaCare Marketing Snags
    Speaking MediaPost’s Marketing Health conference, Adam Stalker, national digital director of Enroll America, says the group --- which markets Americans to sign up for health insurance -- used the lessons from gathering big data for the Obama Presidential advertising campaigns. But it wasn’t enough. Stalker says the goal in targeting the 41 million Americans came down to 12 states where two-thirds of people weren’t insured. More specifically it focused on 10 states and started knocking on doors-- this supplemented by a paid-media campaign. But the results were difficult -- almost at the outset. …
  • Apple's Healthbook Comes Into Focus
    New details have emerged regarding Apple's ambitious heath and fitness-tracking service, Healthbook. Still in beta, "Versions of Healthbook in testing are capable of tracking several different health and fitness data points," 9To5Mac's Mark Gurman reports. Yet, "It is currently uncertain where this data will actually be sourced from," Gurman notes. "I believe that the data will be sourced from at least one of four possibilities: the iPhone itself, third-party App Store apps, third-party devices, or a future Apple wearable device (iWatch)."
  • Bolthouse Farms Launches Foodpornindex.com
    Bolthouse Farms owns the majority of the beverage juice market, but less than half of the OMMA SXSW attendees Saturday admitted to knowing the brand after Pamela Naumes, director of brand engagement, asked for a show of hands.
  • Brands Like Dell Building Newsrooms
    "Brands feel like they have to build a newsroom, but believe me -- they would rather not," said former journalist Stephanie Losee, now managing editor at Dell. Losee said during the OMMA SXSW conference Saturday that brands would rather lean on publications like "Forbes" and "The New York Times," which joined her on a panel questioning whether content will become the new advertising.
  • Astrophysicist Tyson Questions Value Of Macy's Parade, Says It's Full Of Hot Air
    Astrophysicist and science media star Neil deGrasse Tyson is an expert on the physical universe, but he demonstrated some insights about the branding universe Saturday during a keynote conversation at the SXSWi festival in Austin. The brand he shed new light on was retail giant Macy's. Speaking about the need for Americans to become more questioning, skeptical and scientifically minded, Tyson shared a longtime wish he has had about Macy's trademark branding event. the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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