Medicine Avenue: New offering at Ogilvy CommonHealth
Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide is introducing a new service offering to its family, Wellbeing@OgilvyCommonHealth, to focus on the health and wellness needs of the American healthcare consumer. The new unit, the concepts of which were introduced to clients earlier in the year in the process of validating and refining them, is being hard-launched in real time now.
Paul O’Neill is president of wellness marketing at OCHWW and is heading the new unit. According to O’Neill, clients have been very receptive to the newest service offering, which has put together a number of behavior change principles, “a rigorous and disciplined process for how we think about engineering positive behavior change and wellbeing.
“What we’re finding with our clients is that it’s not necessarily that they have never thought about this before, but the way it’s being articulated feels like an advancement to many of them. And we’re getting a lot of positive traction for that reason. … So far, the uptake has been very positive.”
Although the concept of “wellness” has been fairly nebulous in its application to healthcare marketing, Wellbeing will be very focused and address a specific gap in the healthcare advertising market.
“One of the things that we as an industry had been thinking of and speaking to healthcare consumers was really around a binary approach to wellness, in that you’re either well, or not well,” O’Neill says. “That is just not consistent with the way people experience life and the way that they pursue wellness. It’s not a static ‘I am’ or ‘I am not,’ it really is a series of oftentimes small and sometimes large decisions, choices, and behaviors that take on a long or continual pathway or journey to try and get to a higher level of wellness, and there is no end state. We look at the idea of wellness as being a multidomain, from health to psychosocial to family to financial, all the aspects that go into the healthy and balanced life. … The reality is, it’s not achievable, if you had ever got it, you had it for a second, and then something would change.”
O’Neill says this view of the ongoing pursuit of wellness is Wellbeing’s platform. And as changes in the U.S. healthcare system have forced consumers to be more active about their health, and consumers themselves have become much self-motivated, there is a more holistic view of the pursuit of wellbeing. According to O’Neill, “We’ve all engaged more, and the system has forced us to take on more responsibility.”
Another factor driving the wellness revolution, and a reason for creating Wellbeing, is the huge amount of information available to healthcare consumers – but most do not know how to interpret and use it. “The problem is, there’s a knowledge gap,” O’Neill says. “The information is there, but we as laypeople don’t know how to process that information and turn it into knowledge and therefore use it to make these decisions and change our behaviors.”
Additionally, much of the information that can be freely found is suspect. “It’s very seductive, you can fall into following some very bad information without having that learned intermediary of your doctor over your shoulder,” O’Neill says. “You can make some very poor decisions thinking you’re doing the right thing. That’s almost doubly damning, because you’re changing your behavior thinking you’re going in the right direction but it’s making things worse.”
All of this means “there is a tremendous opportunity for responsible marketing to step into that void, and for brands to really partner with people as they’re trying to make these new decisions and not be misinformed,” O’Neill says. “If marketers can do this responsibly and ethically, they can help people move along this journey of wellbeing, and our Wellbeing practice is driven all around that – how do we help brands identify the knowledge gap and communicate around that in a helpful way.”
Editor’s note: A version of this article ran on PharmaLive.com on 11/19/2015.
