Health advertising: Do our research insights need to get in the real world?

Magnifying glass, laptop

Health advertising: Do our research insights need to get in the real world?

By John Marchese

It’s time we dumped one of healthcare marketing’s laziest excuses. You know the one: if an ad “fails,” blame the creative. This familiar knee-jerk isn’t just unfair, it’s inaccurate. Too often, a campaign’s inability to inspire change isn’t down to artwork or execution, it’s down to research and briefing that pulls up short. It pains me to say it but, as strategists, that’s on us. We’ve got to do more to give creatives the best view of our audience’s world.

Most people that work in health advertising will tell you they do it for one purpose only: to change lives. It’s a cliché but it’s true. We’re privileged to work in a vertical where – perhaps more than any other category – helping humanity is an everyday pursuit. However, while success is inevitably framed by our creative output, the end-result – good, bad, or indifferent – is firmly rooted in our upfront strategy. 

And it all hinges on the quality of our insights. Insight generation is tricky in health. The “emotive pull” of a life changed by disease can trick us into thinking that a surface-level insight is rich and compelling simply because there’s some emotion in it. But just because something sounds compelling doesn’t make it so. Surface-level insights don’t inspire creative that connects in the real world.  If we’re going to create experiences that change lives, we need to look harder, dig deeper, and understand our audiences holistically. That means considering end users as people, not just patients or HCPs. It’s a very different mindset to how we’ve worked in the past.

 Let’s face it, we all work on great brands that can make a big difference in people’s lives. But in truth, we often pretend that our audiences think about those brands a lot more than they actually do. As marketers, we eat, sleep, and breathe our therapy areas. And rightly so; it’s a fundamental requirement to understand that world. But for a person with a given condition, that disease is just a sliver of the pie that makes them who they are. It’s an important sliver, for sure, but it’s only one small part of a much bigger whole. Insight generation should mirror those proportions.

The same applies to HCPs. We need to forget the idea that they spend all their time thinking about us, and instead focus on methodologies that uncover real-world insights into what makes them tick. That’s how we’ll inspire communications that hit home.

 We spend a lot of time creating patient journeys, where the disease is at the epicenter. That makes sense for us as brand marketers, but does it make the same sense for the people we’re trying to help? I’m not so sure. We’ve recently done a ton of work mapping patient journeys in migraine, and it highlights the dangers of taking a disease-centered approach. For example, the 40-year-old woman who happens to have migraines has a bigger journey – as a human being – that’s got nothing to do with migraines at all. Yes, there are times when migraines will get in the way of that journey, but if we only focus on the headaches, we miss a huge chunk of who she is and what she needs. It’s an object lesson for insight generation. If we focus narrowly on the disease, we miss the human element of the people we’re trying to connect with. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the disease, it means that we’ll learn more if we begin by looking at the person before then working out how the disease gets in their way.

So here’s the kicker. The traditional research methodologies that drive our strategic insights are no longer enough. As therapeutic markets get more crowded, pharma brands are becoming less differentiated, largely competing around functional differences like dosage, frequency, or medicating at home. But if brands can’t differentiate on outcomes, they can certainly differentiate on the experience – through communications that connect with the things that matter most to our audiences.

To do that, we need to shift the balance of how we do research so that we spend less time testing our work and more time digging into human insights. That means more ethnography. More listening to people having real conversations in their own environment. More speaking to people as human beings with complex lives, rather than sick patients with disease X. More real world, less “our world.” 

By continually pushing for deeper, better, human-centered insights, strategists have a big opportunity to help creative teams craft life-changing experiences. Because if we can’t understand those moments that matter – up front, and crystal clear – our creative will never quite get there.

Ultimately, though, health advertising is a collective responsibility. Strategists don’t write briefs, teams do. If we want to change lives, we need to rethink our approach to insight generation and put people, not patients, at the center of the journey.

John Marchese, VMLY&R John Marchese is chief strategy officer at VMLY&R Health NYC.