Do you remember the last time your sales reps sat down with a doctor and spent a few minutes chatting about your new drug? And how deftly they used the detail aid you spent months developing, perfecting, and crafting into the perfect message with the perfect visual? Can’t recall, huh? It’s probably been a while.
 
Did you know that 93% of sales calls on doctors last less than 2 minutes? Today’s physicians have patients to see, insurance to file and tests to run. Now they also have email to read and Blackberrys to check. Not to mention thousands of medications that change almost daily.  Who’s really going to have time for a nice chat about the arachidonic-acid cascade in the GI tract?
 
So how do we solve our time-challenged doctor issues? We’ve got to stop relying on salespeople. They do a great job, sure, but they can’t do it all. Especially in 120 seconds. Marketers have got to start thinking outside the sales call. We need to aggressively look to the web, to things like YouTube and video searching. Find those PDAs and use them to get the doctor a better message, one that’s tailored to him and is relevant to his practice. And don’t forget about those journal ads, either.

Look, no one likes a big fat visual aid more than an ad agency executive, so this is hard for me to admit. I love being able to tell the story of my clients’ products. That means we have to stay one step ahead of our targets, which these days, means running. So get your sneakers on and get those ideas going. You’ve got less than 2 minutes.

When we launched HC&B as a healthcare-focused marketing company, we got a lot of skepticism from our peers. Most ad agencies in this town are generalist shops (many working with tech clients) and most healthcare agencies are clustered around the pharmaceutical industry in the northeast and Chicago. Healthcare only? In Austin?  It’ll never fly! But given HC&B’s 25%+ annual growth, it turns out we’re onto something. We think that’s because of Austin’s unique nexus of technology expertise and creativity.  

Healthcare is undergoing a revolution, largely fueled by advancements in high-tech medical devices, high-science pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering and diagnostics. Austin provides us with both employee talent and client opportunities for healthcare technology marketing. Austin’s well-deserved reputation as a top creative city also helps us to recruit talent with a fresh alternative to the often formulaic world of traditional healthcare advertising. Both B2B and B2C clients find HC&B’s creative approach both unexpected and effective.

Kerry and I found affirmation of our creative culture last Fall, when we picked up a coveted Medical Marketing & Media Award for HC&B’s Texas Oncology print campaign. There were 1500 attendees at that Tavern on the Green event and only twelve Golds were given out. Eleven of ‘em went to Chicago or New York agencies, but one went to that upstart Austin shop called HC&B.

It’s enough to make you sing Home With The Armadillo.

We’ve all heard enough already about social websites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn exploding in popularity. Social networking is all the buzz these days. And we all know that if the internet is good for anything it’s finding a stage for niche subjects to have their day in the sun. So the rise in niche health social media sites should be no surprise.  If you buy into the doom and gloom of the looming recession then the latest the Forrester Research report makes an interesting argument that marketers should move dwindling dollars from traditional media into social media like word of mouth, blogging and social networking. Here are a few examples of healthcare niche social networking sites:
 
DailyStrength.org: Gives patients and caregivers a place to join a support community, write a journal, share videos, and even send other members a virtual “hug.”
 
PatientsLikeMe.com: Community for people battling devastating diseases that provides a platform for collecting and sharing real world, outcome-based patient data.
 
ICYou.com: The YouTube of health care, ICYou.com offers over 1,500 posted videos on everything from recipes for diabetics to vlogs from cancer patients.
 
ReliefInSite.com: A web-based pain assessment and tracking diary that empowers patient’s to receive better and faster treatment by sharing their pain diary with their doctors, nurses, pain specialists, therapists, friends and family members.
 
Sermo.com: Accessible only by physicians, allows the 50,000 strong physician community to tap “the wisdom of crowds” to help them accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments.

AUSTIN, TX (March 3, 2008) HC&B Healthcare Communications, one of the nation’s top 25 independent healthcare firms, has hired Libby Wilson as a senior account executive. With extensive experience in technology and consumer marketing, she will work primarily on women’s health and managed care accounts, reporting to Kim Carpenter, account director.

“Libby’s strong management abilities and deep insights into technology and DTC will be major assets to our growing roster of clients, which represent the full healthcare spectrum,” said Kerry Hilton, the agency’s CEO and creative director.

Wilson, 29, comes to HC&B from T3, an integrated marketing firm, where she was a senior account executive in the company’s Austin office. While there, she managed the development and execution of the Dell small and medium business catalog.

Before that, Wilson was project manager at Slack Barshinger, a business-to-business marketing firm in Chicago, where she managed technology accounts including eBay, PayPal and Orbitz. She also worked in the Chicago office of global advertising network Draft Worldwide (now Draftfcb) as a freelance account coordinator for leading consumer companies, including Kellogg’s cereals.

Wilson received a B.S. in journalism from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan, and attended the American Intercontinental University in London during a study abroad program.