Hive Health

It struck me lying in a restaurant after lunch what an overlapping world we all live in.

Around the table sat a social media planner, product designer and a sociologist. Our conversation focused on developing anything to be better than it was . Those ‘things’ that make your competitors spit blood and wish they had made it themselves. I use ‘things’ here as it helps with knitting us together somewhat. Although widgets, products, research papers and communications all seem dead far way from each other our worlds link closely when you need to produce something that connects.

Interestingly what the sociologist called participant observation – which in her field mostly seemed to cover deviant behaviour, the product designer knew as a consumer closeness, and I and the social media planner knew as planning. All involve long periods of either following, viewing and recording interactions with other players, structures or items. It’s all about intimate familiarity with someone and often something. We all seek to view, with permission and learn from it.

The social media planner and I looked on with interest; this approach is something we know really well. We scoffed at the pomposity of the terminology. Participant observation total toss. Surely this is exactly what we do?  Having opened my mouth way before engaging brain. It turns out (most obviously) now that the world of participant observation is pretty old, whilst us lot in advertising hark to Berbach in the 1950s and the rise of planning. Our Sociologist colleagues top trump us with their Bernbach equivalent – the Persian anthropologist Abu Rayhan al-biruni who was collating people patterns in order to solve problems a little further back in 973-1048.

The product designer, seeing me floored with historical accuracy, decided to fill me in with the history of ”industrial design” and the birth in the early 1900s of industrialised consumer products. I sat fascinated (but pretending to be bored) at the world of Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to establish a partnership between product manufacturers and design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets. It’s apparently this that built the foundation for German user centric design and creativity and placed them on a competitive footing with England and the United States.

Finding myself between established audience centric disciplines. I sought the bleeding edge with the social media planner – an online anthropologist. Her faculty of genius came mostly with names like Wolfsninjaw536, and most notably from a insightnip546 and were at the early days of defining the discipline. Just like the days when Madison Avenue was split between Bill Berbach and ‘the depth boys’ and Rosser Reeves who ran the Ted Bates agency and fronted the ‘find a USP and repeat it loads’ clan. More can be read about this in this brilliant BBC film and article. Her world was splitting into factions all trying to distill a client sellable truth, in a chaotically mobile landscape.

Whats does this all mean? That techniques of all of us are useful to all of us? That terminological transparency would help us all? Perhaps – but simply for me it that what we know to be useful is more often that not being used and bettered by many other disciplines.

A fascinating lunch with a pretty academic discussion and loads of overlap at the least.  A new group of people to borrow stuff for the problems we tackle day to day at the most.

These days pharmaceutical companies are faced with shrinking sales forces and reduced access to healthcare professionals. With less time to learn about products and meet with reps, they’re increasingly turning to the internet for information. To help keep up, pharma brands are being pushed to find more effective ways of promoting themselves digitally.

To help solve this problem, Physicians Office Resource (POR), a trusted digital and print resource for over 360,000 US physicians, has launched a new site: PharmaCONNECT. It allows pharmaceutical brands to actively engage the right healthcare professionals, at a convenient time and in a trusted context. The site offers physicians and pharma companies a place to connect in real time or by appointment, in a product agnostic or neutral environment.

By giving digital space (impressions) to pharma brands for free, PharmaCONNECT only charges for successful, active engagements. Active engagements are the types of interactions that can truly impact on prescription decisions, such as a healthcare professional scheduling a rep visit through the POR site, getting eDetailed, clicking to chat with a rep, or a variety of other engagement options.

PharmaCONNECT hopes to create a space where healthcare professionals can have meaningful and measurable engagement that will help pharma companies to get their message across.  The site will also include a resource section and a frequently asked questions page. The site works on the Android and iOS platforms while mobile apps are in development, including a click-to-call feature for iPhone, so healthcare professionals can connect to a rep right away.

Since its launch at the start of this month Novartis, Genentech, Abbott, Bayer Schering, AstraZeneca, BMS, Roche, Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim have all already established a multiple brand presence, and POR claims to have 15 to 20 other pharma companies set to join by end of the year.

PharmaCONNECT is currently only operating in the US; it will be interesting to see if it expands globally, and if pharma companies continue to embrace this new platform.

Buzzing.

That’s how I felt after 2 hours hearing from the gurus of Facebook and Google. They have changed our world and they will continue to do so. Search and social media. Without them brands and their web-presence are increasingly irrelevant.

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

The power of this mission is extraordinary. The passion of those that work there is contagious. There are 400 million active users. Returning regularly. Sharing their favourite things with those they know.  Did you know that your propensity to click on an article or join a group if you know that one of your friends has, is multiplied around 80 times? The joy of “Your friend likes this”. And it’s free! Community networks and social media are more enormous and more powerful than any media that has gone before. Social media can turn a marketing monologue into a consumer dialogue. It can give a brand talkability, shareability. Ignore it and miss out.

Google = Search.

A concept that the global population is very used to. But, the future of search is making the past look antiquated. It’s mobile and almost human in nature reflecting voice, eyes, skin and location by using speaker, camera, touch-screen and GPS to replace the Google search bar.

“Not being top of search in Google is like the modern day equivalent of being out of stock.”  This comment came from one of the most senior marketers at one of the top pharmaceutical companies. And it really stuck in my mind. How often has search been the last thing on the list?

So what can we learn from all this? A lot. Search and Social Media – If no one can find your brand and no one likes your brand, your brand has a problem. But on the plus side, the opportunities these create are endless. Thank you Google and Facebook for changing the world and making it a better and more connected place.

How our industry is seen is a present annoyance for me.  I was forced by to go to a recent boys charity do and with a load of  bankers – I was turned on with multiple questions on the solid nature of what I do. Apparently ‘Media’ (said with a lightness of voice – try Frank Spencer/crossed with Dale Winton) as a sector is just nonsense. Not real work. Staggering my fellow charity goers all are in derivatives traders – pot – kettle – noir I said – infuriating them further.

I can understand this portrayal of what we do as airy-fairy-nonsense. Last night I tried to explain branding to our old IT guy Tony, who errs on the side of functional to say the least.  He just wasn’t convinced. Despite wearing Nike, carrying blackberry, and swearing by Persil, outside The Blue Posts it became apparent that I was never going to convince him on any decision making other that rational. It was the source of some frustration and much cider. But then he loves Carling because its tastes better than any other lager. (A belief I am still staggered by)

Returning to the bankers, it’s possible the view of the man in the (city) street is of the Gucci loafer wearing, Hoxton types, designing for an hour a day in-between their table fussball games that they really object to. I think also it’s the thought of a group of individuals earning  ”footballer wages” (sic), miles always from any market forces that further angered these guys. These guys just didn’t get what it’s all for. Yet when you speak to them about ads – these seem to be a result of some higher power – that clearly has never been near to a fussball tournament or infantile hand shake.

We need to dissect the elements of creativity, how a piece works, which elements are working  which need work. Assessing ideas requires words borrowed from an emotive/artistic dictionary. Which is why a collection of (daft) terms surrounds us and why often this collection of terms makes very little sense to the un-initiated.  We are immersed in tone, value, emotion, function, all elements of an idea that does something to its viewers. Perhaps this is “not the sort of thing anyone believes for a nanosecond in the real world”. but it’s a reality of our life we need the words to do the job.  I have a feeling that these are totally important to us, it’s their public outings that tend to persuade non – industry bods that what we do is just nonsense. Looking around the 5,000 member Facebook group – “Don’t tell my mum I’m in advertising – she thinks I play piano in a brothel” perhaps sums it up. A good indication of the shame those in our industry feel. Perhaps?  Perhaps not?

Why we shy away from just telling it like it is I don’t really know. Basically all that stuff we talk is for one real aim – to better connect in some way with an audience. The creation of an idea is about savings, it’s budgetary. Really it is.  Whether you are a planner, creative or suit, the business is about efficiency. We just seem reticent to tell others that by doing it this way we connect cheaper. We find ways of developing  relationships with audiences and brands that would otherwise cost more. Agree or disagree, I am not sure why the industry continues to be scared of this – hire us we will save you money seems a blinding recessionary position.

Simple as that.

Ps. No rhyming slang has been used in this blog.