Walgreens is fundamentally changing its relationship to the people it serves. The prescription customer has become the healthcare patient, and Walgreens has had to marshal its data and communications to craft personalized interactions with a massive base, who have often been invisible to the healthcare economy. At MediaPost's Pharma and Health Insider Summit last month, we explored with Walgreens-Boots Alliance's VP of Customer Experience Fauzia Somani how the company is making this transition from pharmacist to healthcare provider.

To get the most from brand presences on social you need sophisticated listening protocols, data and analytics infrastructure and a plan for democratizing that intelligence so that brand leaders can use it. Those were just some of the key takeaways from one of the highlights of last week's MediaPost Pharma and Health Insider Summit. Danny Gardner, GSK's Analytics Manager, US and NA Social Intelligence Lead brought us inside how GSK cultivated its consumer brand social listening post in house. Engagement - the "What" people are interacting with, does not tell you "Why." For that you need the tech, infrastructure and …

When brands truly embrace audio as a persistent content market strategy, there is an opportunity for making a mark. At this week's MediaPost Pharma and Health Insider Summit, Providence St. Joseph Health's Mary Renouf outlined the company's ambitious project for providing a full-blown health information audio station on Internet radio and podcasting. An initial "Future of Health" program blossomed into a full-blown network of shows featuring expertise not only from one of the nation's largest hospital networks, but with that company's own business partners. Yes, this is a case where a branded content program in turn started a business creating …

For most Americans, doctor's visits can be frightening from both a health and financial perspective. As Laso CEO Tim Kaufeldt tells Brand Insider this week, out-of-pocket costs in the high deductibles world of health "underinsurance" has left an opening for a true digital marketplace for ad hoc care. The Laso app matches patients with doctors in an Uber-like way - providing a flat up front cost for most procedures. Kaufeldt's marketing challenge is a bit like Uber's in its early days - getting people to realize that riding in a stranger's car may be preferable to the more familiar but …

Walgreens played a critical role in vaccinating America during the Covid-19 crisis, and so, suddenly, pharmacy "customers" also became "patients." And many of those patients, often underserved by the overall healthcare system, came with complex histories and relationships with that system. When we spoke with Walgreens' Senior Director, Media Strategy & Planning Jennifer Peelle this spring, she explained how the company had to leverage data sets and predictive modeling in new ways to reach the underserved and hesitant audiences in very specific places and with precisely targeted messaging.

Is "clean" the new sexy? If you are a mom or dad put off by the treacherous-sounding "Inactive ingredients" in your kid's Acetaminophen or OTC allergy elixir, then you are the kind of "better-seeker" Genexa's co-founder David Johnson wants to talk with. Hell, he even puts his phone number on every OTC med he sells across tens of thousands of retail outlets.

Most pharma and healthcare marketing is anodyne or laughable...usually both. Bayer's Global CMO Patricia Corsi is on a crusade to make ad creative live up to its name again. Her team has executed one of the few major marketing campaigns I have seen in recent years that authentically earns the otherwise empty buzzword "purposeful branding". Starting in a test in Brazil, the Vagina Academy used data to drive a key cultural insight and then addressed it with consumer-driven creative energy that broke harmful taboos.

Gaming is as huge as it has been hard for marketers to crack. Advertising traditionally is all about interruption and distraction, but players engage their favorite shooter or tile-match app specifically to avoid distraction, to immerse their senses, to focus attention. PepsiCo is among the true pioneers marketing into this space. Paul Mascali, who leads that effort, tells Brand Insider this week that enhancing gameplay, not distracting from it, remains the simple rule of marketing into game experiences. The goal is not just to be in the game, but to think like a game designer.