Where healthcare plays next: four takeaways from Advertising Week New York

Our co-founder and managing director Emma Maria Calleja took the stage on Tuesday 6 October for the opening panel of Advertising Week New York’s first-ever Health Pharma Summit.

The panel, ‘Where Healthcare Plays Next,’ brought Emma together with Emily Martin of argenx and Kamal Bhandal of Align Technology, with Scott Ensign of Butler/Till in the moderator’s chair.

It was a full crowd, buzzing with the over-caffeinated energy of the day’s first session, and a big question on the table: how far healthcare can go in becoming more culturally relevant, human and even entertaining, without losing trust and responsibility?

Here’s where the conversation took them, in four of Emma’s mic-drop moments:

1. Bring patients into the conversation.

“The traditional hierarchy of doctors over patients needs to be eliminated,” Emma said. Patients are taking a growing role in their own care decisions, and marketing needs to catch up by actively involving them in the communication process from the beginning.

2. Trust over information.

As quoted in EMARKETER, patients have never had more health information at their fingertips. But with varying advice across social media, AI tools and online, making sense of it is another matter. Emma says this creates a big opportunity for healthcare marketers: “Information is no longer the currency for patients. Trust is.”

3. Make communication human.

Healthcare comms can be simple, human, and even fun, without reducing people to a diagnosis or cutting corners on the science. “Instead of describing a product, we should be understanding how the product is complementing the experience of a human,” Emma said.

4. Change starts from within.

Human-first marketing needs a human-first culture behind it. And according to Emma, it starts with a single word: “We have to stop calling patients ‘subjects.’ A word defines meaning, meaning defines culture, culture defines strategy.”