I was recently editing a soon-to-be released book-Going Mad:The Rise and Fall and Rise of a Madison Avenue Lunatic-by advertising legend Steve Penchina. You might not know his name, but you know his work; in particular, the Xerox "Monk" commercial that landed him in the Clio Hall of Fame and which the New York Times named "One of the best 35 commercials ever made." One particular anecdote that stood out to me in his book, however, was about the work of Carl Ally Inc., an agency he worked for before starting his own.

Yes, e-mail has gone through phases in healthcare marketing since 2001, but, no, it is not going to be obliterated. Email remains one of the "meat and potatoes" means of communication between healthcare brands and consumer targets.

As the blitz of new data about ballooning healthcare costs continues to intensify (in March, "The Annals of Family Medicine" published a paper projecting that health costs will equal half of the average paycheck by 2021), the banging of the behavior-change drum grows ever louder. Hospitals, health insurance companies, employers and national and local government -- all are focusing their efforts on behavior change to stem the tide. The thinking is seductively simple: three of the top five killers in this country are the direct result of bad diet and no exercise. If we just get people to change their …

One of the most exciting times a hospital marketing team has is when it's in the early stages of a web site redesign. As a baseball fan, it's similar to spring training, when everything seems possible, and there's energy that's derived from a sense of reinvention.

A call to "think different" pharma marketing.

Healthcare marketers today face a most challenging and opportunistic time. Perhaps there has never been an era where marketers had more opportunities, technologies and audiences primed and ready to be embraced. And yet, for all the same reasons, it presents a difficult environment. Despite all the opportunities, marketers are competing in a most cluttered and time-strapped world that makes it difficult to grab and hold consumer's attention.

I recently went on a hiking trip in New Zealand where one in our group had the most expensive gear: boots, clothing, poles, backpack. Despite his lavish equipment, he was always the last one to arrive at the destination and, ultimately, injured himself to the extent that he couldn't finish the trip! We all chattered about the guy with "all the gear, but no idea."

2012 is meant to be a tumultuous year on many counts-for politics, for astrology, for Tiger Woods-and, I suspect, for the future of our national healthcare model. A perfect storm is brewing and the forces at play are familiar to most transformations in history- technology, legislation, and economics.

Mobile health technology (mHealth) offers exciting opportunities to access and administer healthcare on the go. Patients and providers alike can benefit from the explosion of mobile devices and tools being developed to improve access, increase monitoring and lower costs. But are smartphones and tablets actually being used for healthcare? How can we encourage users to do so?

Consider the two ends of the pharmaceutical promotion spectrum: On one end lies the journal advertisement. It resides within a periodical, stationary and silent, eager to inform and persuade those who happen upon it. It's a one-shot deal: either its headlines, imagery and copy resonate with the clinician, or they don't.