I am going to try and get the juices flowing the Monday after Thanksgiving or as many of you are aware “Cyber Monday.” Cyber Monday is the unofficial start of online holiday shopping, comScore is projecting $700 million in online sales today!
Are you running a DTC campaign now? in 2008? What digital assets are you creating to further touch your consumer? We all know our DTC campaigns, if successful, create awareness of a condition or a drug. What is the next step? Expand the campaign to further engage and influence the consumer.
If you look outside the pharma industry, last Monday Apple launched an online campaign featuring the Mac guy. Instead of repurposing the TV spot, Apple created an original script just for the internet. In the first two days it had been viewed on YouTube 70,000 times.
Zach Leary, director of interactive creation at TBWAChiatDay’s Media Arts Lab states, “We don’t disclose the success of our clients’ campaigns, but I can tell that original content is much more effective in engaging consumers than repurposed content. This ad (Mac) is a perfect example of that.”
So back to pharma land, we have all read the stats, 65-85% turn to the Internet for health information. What digital assets should we create to further engage the consumer during a DTC campaign?
2 Comments
Heather:
When will big pharma begin to seriously address African American healthcare disparities (e.g. the 3x High Blood Pressure, 4x Diabetes, 5x HIV/AIDS, 2x Cancer) among black America. Since you point to digital DTC strategies, I’ll also point to a 2006 study by Pew Internet which showed 120% broadband adoption by African Americans. Horowitz Associates also has compelling digital media usage data among ethnic minorities. All this to say that pharma-co’s can’t hide behind the rhetoric that minorities are on the web, or other digital platforms. Lastly African Americans are desperate for healthy-lifestyle solutions across all media channels and platforms. Its time for big pharma to dump $2M the field-of-flowers commercials with actors happy-go-lucky with cancer, driving sale boats and playing banjos and looking for “the-right moment,” and start saving some real lives.
Thank you for your comments. I appreciate the thoughts. I agree, a concerted effort to address the African American healthcare issues is much needed. As always, I will bring it back to search and marketing strategies. If you want to respond to those African Americans looking for healthcare solutions we need to discuss it in our content, whether it be text, video, blogs. Content is king.