Why Video?

Sitting in her doctor’s office, Cheryl G. listened carefully as her doctor explained her latest test results.  Her heart condition had not responded to diet and exercise alone. It was time for the next step: drug therapy. He explained the drug was safe, and millions of patients had benefited from this therapy. Then, writing the first of what was to be a life-long series of prescriptions, he gave her his standard first script speech.

“Take this once a day, with or without food. Then, in 1 month I’m going to ask you come back to have some blood drawn so we can chart your progress. In the meantime, call me if you experience any side-effects.”

It was reassuring for Cheryl to learn how many Americans were on this drug, so when her doctor closed her chart and asked if she had any questions, she said no.

An Hour Later She Had Second Thoughts

But an hour later, waiting in line at the pharmacy, Cheryl began to second-guess her self. Look how long the line was at the counter. She Googled the medication on her mobile phone. A staggering number of results came up. Where to begin? The drug’s brand name website appeared early in the search results, so she clicked there. It seemed more authoritative.

While it was hard to read on an iPhone, she was able to zoom and swipe her way through the site, which was mostly text anyway, until the pharmacist called her name.

At home she noticed there was a 2-page piece of paper inside the bag with her pills. More text. More reading. She couldn’t understand half the medical terms. Why couldn’t they give her the big picture instead of listing a set of turn-by-turn directions? What Cheryl really wanted was a “MapQuest for health.”

Flipping open her laptop she searched again, now having an easier time clicking through various websites. Some seemed legitimate. Others opinionated. Google included video thumbnails in their search results, so she clicked on one of those and landed on YouTube.

  • “Brand X – It Could Harm You!”
  • “Brand X – Updated Safety Information.”
  • “Brand X – Canadian Generics”

Three questions came to mind:

  1. Who were these people posting all these videos?
  2. Why weren’t there any video search results on YouTube or Google from the company that made the drug?
  3. What was she supposed to do next?

The 15% Solution

Pharmaceutical teams in charge of reaching patients grapple with Cheryl’s problem daily. Should they guide a patient to a healthcare portal like WebMD, to an unbranded site about the disease, or to their own BrandName.com?

Internet analyst comScore says if you’re looking to improve the odds of a first prescription ever being filled at all, send patients to your own BrandName.com site. Visits to a branded website generated positive lifts in conversions:

  • New Patient Starts = +8.8%
  • Adherence / Next Rx Fill = +15.5%

Driving patient traffic to your brand website is smart business. Leveraging the number one growth trend driving all Internet traffic is even smarter.

You knew video was hot. But this hot?

You may have known that online video is growing, but did you know just how fast?  According to Cisco, general internet traffic is expect to quadruple by 2014, while online video is projected to increase by a whopping 2,600%. Medical Marketing Media summed it up neatly:

“If there was any doubt, online health video has now officially arrived as a means of reaching consumers.”

Video should be a MUST on every brand team’s agenda. Almost half of people researching prescription drug information online included health videos as part of their search session, according to Manhattan Research.

“The growing health video audience represents a strong opportunity for DTC marketers, particularly because this media format leads to considerable post-visit action.”

Monique Levy, Senior Director of Research
Manhattan Research

But where are patients directing their search efforts? Rodale, publishers of magazines “Prevention,” “Men’s Health” and “Women’s Health”, found in their 12th national survey “Consumer Reaction to DTC Advertising of Prescription Drugs” that the top two internet destinations for patients were:

  • Health Information Portals like WebMD, RightHealth and The Mayo Clinic
  • Pharmaceutical brand websites

 

Smart Money Makes Smart Investments

With so much buzz around “social media” it’s revealing that social media for pharmaceutical brand communication came in dead last at just 6% according to Rodale. It would seem that patients don’t want healthcare information from Facebook or Twitter at all; which may explain why social media has yet to deliver a defensible return on investment for brand teams.

A widely published study by Forrester Research found that including video on a web page enhanced your page’s likelihood of appearing at the top of a search results page by 53 times. That’s right: Google (and now Yahoo and Bing) use an algorithm that disproportionately weights video by at times as much as 5,300%.

Looking at all of the data – comScore, Cisco and Forrester – you see a dynamic brand ecosystem, which in the right hands can deliver a 1-2-3 punch:

  1. Video – pushes search results up, and is what the Internet wants given its explosive growth
  2. Healthcare Information Portals – like WebMD, Mayo Clinic and Revolution Health – deliver the imprimatur of third party objectivity
  3. Branded websites - provide authority and reassurance for information seeking patients

The smart money seeking immediate, ROI before patent expiration will logically need to leverage video on both health portals and brand sites. The good news is that you are not faced with an “either/or” proposition, but happily a “both/and.” You can create video for a reasonable cost that lives on both your branded site and your health information portal.  The bad news is that not many vendors know how to do it.

How To Select A Patient Education Video Vendor

Video production today is where print design was in the nineties. The costs of the tools needed for layout had dropped significantly, creating hordes of wannabe designers. In those early days many Fortune 500 Companies experimented with in-house print design or vendors with fresh out of the box Apple computers and a copy of PageMaker.

The results were mixed at best. What we now take as common knowledge – hardware and software do not a designer make – were learned the hard way. Those print materials had an “almost but not quite” feel about them. While filled with good intentions, the slicks and annual reports were not up to corporate standards.

With that in mind, here are some of the qualifications you will need to seek out in a patient education video vendor:

  • Visual Storytelling Abilities – Turn the audio off for a moment. Can you tell what the “story” is about? If so, put that vendor on the short list. Otherwise, determine just how well the visual medium is being leveraged, or whether it feels like a “PowerPoint with Music” slideshow.
  • Industry Expertise - Can the vendor describe their production process and change-management documentation? The review process for a corporate video narrating the features, advantages and benefits of a widget is different than the medical legal review of a video that’s going to be accompanied by an FDA Form 2253.
  • Financial Transparency - Can you “follow the money”? Vendors with high fixed overhead in either equipment or software need to pay it off, often times sooner than IRS depreciation laws allow. Tax code never anticipated Moore’s Law of computing capacity doubling every two years. You have the right to choose your hardware/software solution based on what it can do for you, not because someone has to write it off.
  • Multilingual Capabilities - English is no longer predominant language for all American households. As the 2010 US Census revealed, that trend is accelerating. The incremental cost of adding a second language like Spanish is low and lets you reach into formerly inaccessible patient populations. Evaluate it for your project. Make sure your vendor has a proven track record in medical translation – written and spoken word – as well as subtitles and closed-captioning.

A Snake Pit for Brand Messaging

In Spielberg’s action thriller “Raiders of the Lost Ark” one scene always makes audiences gasp: Indiana Jones falling through a trap door only to land in a pit of venomous snakes.  “Snakes. Why does it have to be snakes?” he asks.

Your brand is a bit of a hero too, and likewise subjected to venomous voices over which you formerly had no control:

  • Self-appointed “citizen journalists”
  • YouTuber’s sharing personal, not medical opinions
  • Vocal Tweeters
  • Vindictive Facebookers
  • Bloggers with an agenda

But when you tell your story with video – the language of the Internet – you take back control of your messaging and rebut misinformation with in-kind messaging. Had Cheryl’s prescription been supported by patient education video, no matter where she went online your information would have been there too:

  • Branded websites
  • Health Information Portals
  • Mobile phones too

Supported by forecasts from Cisco, comScore, Forrester and Manhattan Research, video is rich with analytics and ready to integrate with your existing marketing strategies. And when presented in its purest form – with no celebrity endorsements  – it is also the only medium thus far to never have received an FDA warning letter.

Get Started With Video Today