Effective Targeting

In America, more money is now spent on online advertising than on radio or print. The heavy hitters here are auto manufacturers and big packaged goods companies. Their dollars are gravitating in that direction because expensive research is showing them it’s money well spent. Many other businesses can read the signs, and are redirecting their advertising budgets accordingly.

Significantly, online budgets are being further delineated between ads delivered to those using computers versus searching on mobile devices. Use of mobile devices, of course, is skyrocketing.

Health care companies have ventured into online advertising quite slowly, making up only one percent of all online ads. Pharmaceutical companies in particular have to wrestle with presenting required side-effect disclaimers on small screens.

To my mind, however, the greatest challenge to mobile health advertisers is accurate targeting.

I don’t want an ad for an AED served to me on my iPhone when I’m searching for an emergency room to bring a loved one.

One trend that helps better define delivery targets is the growing disparity in age between users of home-based computers and those who are coming to rely on Smartphones and tablets for searches. Folks above 50 years old or so have settled in with their desktops, while younger people are going mobile. Young people research health-related issues such as STDs and pregnancy; older (computer-using) Americans want to know more about heart attacks and IBS. Further, studies show that 18-40 year olds are far more likely to download and use apps that aid in monitoring diet and exercise than are older people.

Every company will have to address the targeting issue, and it’s not going to be easy to make the fine delineations that can make the difference between making a sale and wasting money. For example, I’m working currently with the orthodontic device company OrthoAccel and their product AcceleDent (which accelerates tooth movement so braces can come off faster). OrthoAccel may have an opportunity to effectively advertise their products to potential patients by targeting adults, teens and parents of teens who are searching for local orthodontists. But the company shouldn’t advertise to those searching for information on dental implants – an entirely different category of patients.

Of course, any discussion of targeting advertising through analysis of web browsing behavior and online profiles brings up vexing privacy issues – a subject for another blog.

AdAge recently published a fascinating and potentially very valuable graphic. As part of their American Consumer Project, AdAge commissioned GfKMRI to combine their data on 25,000 American households through the Patchwork Nation segmenting system, which breaks down areas of the country (in this case, counties) in to 12 different kinds of community. This categorization, which includes factors such as economics, culture and politics, goes far beyond overly simplistic terms such as “blue and red” in an attempt to bring more detail and nuance to demographic information.

In this case, the result was a map of the United States that shows the prevalence of major illnesses by county. I’ve reproduced a static version of the map below. For an interactive version that reveals data by county, click here.

Prevalence Map Major Illnesses by County

I, for one, was surprised at the irregularity of illness distribution. What’s with the apparent prevalence of cancer in Northern Iowa/Southern Minnesota? I didn’t know Mormons in Utah suffered so much from ulcers. And speaking of irregularity, look at the pattern of those suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome that follows a swath from Virginia through the Deep South.

The information in the map has been further augmented by a partnership with Modern Healthcare that examines how different generations want to receive health care marketing messages and the increasing relevancy of cross-generational caregivers. A summary is included in white paper available here.

This data should prove extremely useful for medical device and medical technology companies (i.e. digital health/mHealth) in their efforts to more effectively target their efforts in prevention and disease treatment.

Certainly one of the fields most affected by the Internet’s information free-for-all is healthcare. For good and ill, nearly everyone now uses the Internet to check on symptoms, treatments and research. Witness the spectacular popularity of such web sites as WebMD. To most caregivers, this flood of easily accessible information has been a mixed blessing, what with issues such as self-diagnosis and patients second-guessing physicians.

Healthcare vendors also need to confront the consequences of democratic freedom of information access. Recently, there was a lot of press about Hugo Campos, (see his blog here) a patient-activist who was demanding that Medtronic release to him the raw data captured by the company’s implantable cardiac defibrillator, which had been implanted in Mr. Campos in 2007.

Any medical device company should have in place – right now – a carefully considered strategy

Any medical device company should have a strategy

After some fits and starts, Medtronic complied with Mr. Campos’ request. But before doing so, Medtronic wrestled with the issue, particularly how it might affect their relationship with doctors – their direct customers. As Mr. Campos himself put it, “CRDM companies rely on their relationship with doctors to sell their products. Going directly to patients can offset this balance and be seen as having a potentially deleterious effect on their business. They are very careful to not upset the relationship doctors have with their patients.”

Mr. Campos appears to know the impact requests such as his may have on the industry. “I am asking for a significant shift in the way medical device companies do business,” he says.
Those of us in healthcare can justifiably fret about the potential consequences of providing what is often highly technical data to those without the training to correctly interpret that data. But the fact is, the genie is out of the bottle. Any medical device company should have in place – right now – a carefully considered strategy for how to respond when faced with a scenario comparable to the one faced by Medtronics. Not doing so means you run the risk of alienating your customers and suffering a public relations fiasco.

This week I attended a webinar hosted by IBM on the trends for in-home medical devices based on research done in 2010 with over 1,300 US and UK consumers by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. (Here’s the link to the webinar http://bit.ly/bSgY73 )

What I found most interesting was that the research toppled some well-established assumptions such as: 1) consumers are unhappy with their current in-home wellness devices; and 2) in-home devices are mainly used for known health conditions (vs. preventative care devices).  On both counts the research results came back opposite of the ‘common assumptions’.  It seems that consumers are satisfied with their current devices and are ready for more, especially as people become so attuned to using small hand-held electronic devices.  And it seems that the message about preventative care and the benefits it affords is making its way into the home. That to me equates to market opportunities for ‘prevention devices’ (like tracking exercise and physical activity) and even remote monitoring of “someone’s changing health conditions”.

In a recent white paper I co-authored with Tom Scearce (@TLOTL) on Lead Generation, see blog posting below dated March 16, 2010, we highlighted the trend that many Primary Care (PC) organizations (think small private practices) are selling their practices to Acute Care (AC) organizations (think hospitals and health systems) due to many factors.  The New York Times article below captures the reasons quite nicely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/health/policy/26docs.html

But it’s got me thinking more about the importance this shift will have on Medical Marketers plans for the not-too-distant future.  If the purchasing decision maker is now part of the corporate office instead of the practice office then your message needs to target the right audience with the kind of information they are seeking.

I’m not saying that the physician is removed from the purchasing equation, but I am saying that the purchasing agent is added to this equation.  Where formerly in the ‘old’ PC model there was usually the physician, maybe the nurse and potentially the office manager as the decision maker(s) for a new product purchase, with the transition to AC owned practices expect added focus on workflow efficiency gains, product volume discounts, etc.

So keep that in mind when you’re reviewing your launch plans for that next medical device product.  Don’t assume the world is the same as it was as recently as 2005 because it isn’t.