by Mike Myers, President, Palio

It’s a week out since my departure and I’ve been asking myself that question since I stepped on the plane home.

According to their own press, “The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery.”

Focused on the interactive portion of the conference, I had a great time. It was an engaging experience. I learned and relearned things in multiple areas that will help me and help us help our clients be stronger in the market.

It was not, however, filled with any mind blowing, my socks are off type moments filled with new discoveries.

From what I know of previous events, SXSW often sits at the epicenter of evolving technologies that quickly spread from the conference through the digital messiahs who attend.

Twitter and Foursquare are two examples. Apple even created a pop up store to sell the iPad2 in 2011 in order to capitalize on the tech guru mob in Austin.

Don’t get me wrong. There was engaging dialog on: mobile technologies, location based services, the ever changing digital landscape, augmented reality, hacking the Microsoft Kinect, yadda, yadda, yadda.

It was fascinating. It wasn’t groundbreaking.

My thoughts on what I did learn were covered in a prior post on our blog.

In retrospect, the biggest thing I learned may have been that the “next big thing” is still yet to come. In the interim, we better continue to get smarter with the incredible innovations that we just haven’t maximized to the point of extinction yet.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

Saul Morse, VP, Multichannel Integration, Palio

Personal questions. Needles. Uncomfortable smocks that don’t close in the back. Getting – or just waiting for – that phone call with your lab results. With your doctor’s office closed will you even hear before the weekend starts or will it loom overhead? Pokes and prods too numerous to count.

The list of healthcare anxieties goes on and on. And while they are different for nearly everyone, there’s no denying that they exist. Could technology help soothe addled patients and make them feel both more in control of their health? Evidence suggests that may be the case.

The medical industry and patients have developed some comfort with first generation social media sites and often have significant experience with them. Whether it’s looking for cold relief or sharing real-world experiences working in an emergency room, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn are increasingly populated with healthcare information. A second wave, including Pinterest, Google+ and StumbleUpon offers hospitals, medical device and pharmaceutical companies a new set of tools for building a social media strategy.

But public-facing sites are only half the picture; and their very strengths – a large and public base of users – can be a drawback, because patients are rightfully leery of handling private medical data in such public venues. Even pure-information sites in the healthcare space deal with overall perceptions about the Web: It’s big, it’s insecure, and you never know who’s looking at your visitation patterns, search history or other personal details.

But health apps for mobile and tablet platforms may hit a sweet spot.

Apps can offer a more-personalized, more-intimate experience for users, while addressing many security and privacy concerns. While the Web can also deliver this, apps avoid some of the “Who’s going to see this?” perception challenges that a major website may face.

Apps also offer an opportunity for specialized drug-specific, condition-specific or treatment-specific platforms. Many conditions, such as diabetes, are best managed with a steady flow of information – from the patient to a data log, and then on to a physician or other caregiver. The ubiquity of mobile apps and the tendency of users to interact with them many times a day make them a natural for this sort of application.

Finally, mobile apps can reduce anxiety by allowing for always-with-you, always-on anytime access to a community. Whether it’s patients with the same condition, a support group or even real-time access to caregivers, mobile platforms mean that feeling alone with your condition – a major source of anxiety for many people – can be alleviated.

Mobile apps aren’t perfect – from platform compatibility to security issues, they face many challenges with other healthcare 2.0 technology. But for a nation of nervous and worried patients, they offer real opportunities for better education and better care. Also, use PharmApps.com as a resource for healthcare apps.

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.

By  Mike Myers, President, Palio

When asked by a coworker what I learned at SXSW, I had to pause to reflect. My days were spent running from session to session, reviewing what exhibitors were rolling out, and gobbling up as many insights as I could.

“It was overwhelming and energizing” was my quick response.

In the 18 hours since my departure, I’ve had more time to digest the information epiphany that came with my pilgrimage to Austin.

For marketers in the healthcare (or any) space, here are my five key takeaways:

• Misery loves company.  While we’re often told that pharma is behind the times, everyone in every industry is struggling with utilizing new media and technologies. While there were great examples of success, there were countless discussions on overcoming obstacles like legal hurdles and clients who “just don’t get new media.” The key message given consistently was stick with it.
• Likeonomics is the new “currency.” When communicating with customers via social media, being personal and likeable are “common sense” keys to success. Discussed with many examples during a session led by @rohitbhargava, many marketers still ignore the basics of one-to-one focus and overall communication relevance in their brand communications.
• Traditional tactics still have their place.

You could see it in the Exhibitor Hall. You could see it on the streets of Austin with tactics like this Hootsuite Bus. You could hear it in the different sessions. New media and digital tools are lauded, but traditional marketing approaches still have a role in a brand’s tactical plan.

• Creativity is an art and not the hard science people want to make it.  Whether discussing, ideation or the common desire many have to be “edgy” in the marketplace, presenters and attendees spoke to the need to recognize that creativity is a fragile beast. It needs to be nurtured and supported. And to truly be done well, it needs a clear brief with objective(s) that everyone supports – especially the client(s).

• We are in information overload, and to be effective you need to be on top of it.  Ray Kurzweil provided me with a quote that truly summed up a good portion of the conference – “A child in Africa with access to a smartphone has more information at his fingertips than the President of the United States did 15 years ago.”The conference and everything there truly brought home the point that relevance and success in the communications field requires insight that can only come through effort. Regardless of your role in our industry, you must spend time spent reading and experimenting if you want to succeed in the changing environment.

Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

Just last summer, Hyper Island brought their brains to Saratoga Springs and about 50 of us Palio folks devoured every minute of their Hyper Island Master Class – an intensive 3-day immersion into digital media and strategy development.

If you’ve never heard of Hyper Island, take a look at their Web site. In a nutshell, Hyper Island is a Swedish-based, global learning leader that helps companies “stay up to date with the latest trends in interactive media…” and “fully understand how to create efficiency within [their] organization.”

There was a lot of excitement and anticipation leading up to Hyper Island’s visit, and once they got here, things took off quickly. The three days we spent with the Hyper Island team had an immediate and lasting influence on our organization; one that is paying great dividends in terms of how we’re engaging our clients and how we’re structuring and managing our Agency resources and overall growth.

Overall, and among other things, the Hyper Island training has helped us:

• Identify ways we can jumpstart our digital thinking on any given brand,

• Brainstorm digital tactics as part of an integrated, 360-degree media plan, not simply as “add-ons,”

• Bring more depth to our strategic thinking,

• Attain a higher-level understanding of the Web and digital media,

• Wield practical tools that have helped us to better understand the interrelationships of social media and traditional media and bridge the two.

Here’s what some folks were saying once the training was underway. Following are a few post-Hyper Island learnings/observations.

Going Digital – It’s a Frame of Mind

One of the most important things we learned from our Hyper Island experience is that no one group or individual should, or can, own digital strategy and deployment. Today, no one can escape the grasp of digital (screen-based) technology, and no brand can ignore the power of social media as a communications conduit. Digital/social media is ubiquitous and it has to be something that all of us – in creative, account, planning, media and production – leverages and shapes in each of our brand engagements. In other words, everyone is, to some degree, an expert in digital communication because it impacts all of us constantly. And that leads to the realization that smart digital thinking can come from anywhere in the Agency – it’s a frame of mind, not a skill to which some siloed, techno-savvy group lays claim.

Fundamental Shifts

The furious growth of digital/social media has spurred some fundamental shifts in the marketing world, and these shifts, at a macro-level, need to be understood and embraced in order for any marketing or advertising agency to stay competitive. Here are some randomly related thoughts/learnings from our Master Class that capture this (and check out this footage of folks talking about their experience after the training):

• Digital technology is now allowing for content-based marketing strategies, designed to “pull” rather than “push” brand awareness and messaging, to become the rule rather than the exception

• Digital/social media has put never-before-seen power into the customer’s hands

• Having a digital footprint is essential to brand survival

• Marketing is now very much about conversations… and brands need to partake

• Don’t always be a slave to the big idea… thinking tactically first, in some cases, can be the best way to meet a specific marketing challenge

How Is Palio Different After The Island’s Visit?

In fundamental ways, Palio hasn’t changed at all: we’re still an idea company, we’re still all about connecting brands and consumers. But how we go about that has changed in places. Here are just a few examples of how the Hyper Island experience has brought change to Palio:

Now, when we present campaign concepts to our clients, we include what we call a 360-degree Worksheet. It’s a way for us to develop and present our creative thinking in the context of media channels, traditional and digital alike. If an idea doesn’t easily spawn executions around the media horn, it’s probably not something we’ll want to pursue.

We took what we were calling our Incubator, or our digital production group, and eliminated its name as a formal reference. This has served to help break down lines of distinction between digital and non-digital work teams. And though this might sound like an academic change, it has actually gone a long way to promote an efficient and homogenous work environment whereby all of us in the company, not just those in the “Incubator,” are engaged in developing digital strategy and tactics.

As well, we centralized our multichannel production services in the Project Management group and shifted our role definition of Project Managers to Producers. And we evolved the title of our Digital Strategists to, simply, Brand Strategists. Again, it’s pretty amazing how these rather academic-sounding changes have served to unify the company in a media-agnostic fashion.

We looked at our own brand’s digital footprint and made it bigger and more robust. In part, that included creating a new Website and deploying a more focused and active SEO strategy across all of our social media outlets, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr. We also developed a pharmaceutical app wiki called Pharmapps. Right now we’re building the mobile app for it.

We founded our Social Media Council – a committee of cross-functional roles that is tapping people across the organization to help expand our brand’s awareness and develop messaging to potential clients and employees as well as industry watchdogs.

Internally, we’re using Facebook and Yammer more and more for various closed-group communications. That shift has created a more dialogue-driven type of thinking and behavior across our organization… one that also brings a more immediate sense of involvement among team members. How much longer will office e-mail be around?

In a nutshell, Hyper Island was a brilliant rallying cry that brought our organization a new focus on digital media and strategy. Check out the video here/above to get a sense of how inspiring the entire event was for us. In some respects, it was a reaffirmation of what we already knew: digital media is not rocket science, and since we’re not trying to put our clients’ brands on the moon, that’s a good thing. We’re still here to put our clients’ brands into the hearts and minds of the consumer, which digital media can help us with in more effective ways than anything we’ve seen in the past. As Guy Mastrion, Palio’s Chief Creative Officer, says in the video, “Now it’s just a matter of aligning the opportunities and the resources with the right clients.”

Palio is an advertising agency revolutionizing pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing to create experiences that will Never Be Forgotten.