Maureen Wendell, VP, Account Director, Palio

Twenty years ago: 1991.

You go to the doctor. Your chart is a folder stuffed full of papers, one of hundreds in the office. You leave with a prescription, which your physician wrote on a small piece of paper, and you carry it to the pharmacist. The pharmacy – unaffiliated with any larger chain – takes your paper, files it, and fills your prescription. If it’s for a “scheduled” drug, like a narcotic, you sign your name in a large ledger.

Today: 2011.

That chart is likely to be a digital file, and your prescription is equally likely to be transmitted electronically to your pharmacy, where it is filed digitally and cross-checked against your prescription history, for contraindications, and your personal history, for allergies. Your input is either verbal or digital – an answer to a question that you’re asked, which is typed in, or a digital signature. Some people do have a “care team” structure where their different health providers interact directly, but they’re likely to be extremely well-off, or dealing with a serious and specialized issue such as cancer.

Twenty years in the future: 2031. What will your healthcare experience look like?

Despite too many years of legislative hang-ups and politicking, we’ve finally attained a unifiedsystem of electronic health-care records. From your patient profile to your visit report to your prescriptions to your reviews of your experiences, it’s all digital, searchable and shareable.

Your physician and pharmacist both access the same data. Also included are your massage therapist, who helps you with your bad back, and, of course, your insurance. Your dentist or your allergist, however, have different permission levels. The only one who can see everything is you.

You aren’t a lone ship sailing from port to port to manage your healthcare anymore. Your care team can be linked as closely as you would like them to be.

This helps them to address red flags and head off health problems. They’re compensated more highly for preventative work than for curative or palliative care, so they are able to focus accordingly.

Paperwork is minimized, allowing back-office work to be replaced by true patient care. Visit lengths have grown from under 20 minutes to half an hour, and waiting time has shrunk from nearly an hour to 10 minutes.

Because information no longer requires physical housing, many physicians are reverting to house calls, a practice that appeals especially to the elderly, parents of small children, and professionals working long hours.

Because each patient owns the repository of their health data, a variety of tools have sprung up to help them parse and utilize it. Digital scales, thermometers, sleep monitors, blood-sugar monitors and other small wireless tools feed that repository effortlessly, making it ever more useful in predicting and monitoring your health.

What are you working on that can help this future arrive sooner?

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

Rob Kempton, VP, Brand Planning Director, Palio

Anyone who has spent a day in pharmaceutical – or any other type – of sales, will tell you the answer is an unequivocal “no.”

There are cold calls to warm leads and warm calls on glacial leads. There are follow-up calls on established accounts and first-time calls to what may be your next strategic account. There are calls where you get the hand-off, the brush-off or even the flip off, as well as those where you close the deal, make the sale and bring home the cheddar.

Against that backdrop, why would you use the same digital tools for every sales call? The answer is: You wouldn’t.

Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative, Palio

There is no slow season in health care. Whether seeing patients in between personal and professional appointments or a spike in patient visits during cold and flu season, doctors are always busy. For sales reps, this results in a greater challenge getting face time with doctors.

Sales reps may not be used to communicating in a two-minute window, but doctors, nurses and office staff are conditioned to interact that way. Last year on Pixels and Pills, I wrote about being brief and getting to the point when communicating with doctors. That still holds true, but with more doctors tethered to their smartphones and iPads, we need to use technology to change how we communicate with doctors.

Gregory Alderisio, Senior Copywriter, Palio

Let’s say you see an ad in a magazine or on the Web and you absolutely hate the headline. Who do you blame? Naturally, the wretched, abominable writer. Or what if the art direction is so banal or so hideous you recoil in horror. Whose fault is that? Of course, the hapless, no-talent art director.

Pretty much everything wrong with an ad can be laid at the feet of two people: the AD and CW. It’s the same with the glory. A good headline: well, obviously that came from the unique mind of a gifted writer. An inspired visual? Kudos to the innovative genius of the art director. Why would it be any other way? A pair of people did the ad so let’s praise/stone them depending upon how it turned out. And of course at their year-end review, the creative team with too many boring, dull, moronically-simplistic ads gets labeled as lazy, timid or unimaginative. On the other hand, the team with award-winning work gets a raise, a bonus and a big fat ego.

Jessica Goldsmith, Account Supervisor, Palio

In our “Client/Agency” series, we’ve talked about the different ways that clients and agencies view several different facets of their partnership – from time, to the bottom line, to expectations, to creativity to collaboration.

Now we’re going to talk about the fundamentals of the partnership: the different ways that the two parties view their clients.

In both cases, the most important relationship for the person involved is the one with their clients. If this were a tech situation, we’d call them end users. For the client in the “client/agency” pairing, their end users – the client’s clients – are often their marketing colleagues. They need to deliver ideas, plans, materials, collateral, strategies, campaigns: ones that meet the goals and objectives of the brand and of the company as a whole. If their deliverables don’t match those expectations, they have dissatisfied clients.

This much, so far, is obvious.

The problem arrives when agencies forget about this larger client base and think only of their client as being their end user.

Agency folks, here’s a reminder: our client is not just our client.

Our client is that person, yes. But our client is also their client.

We can’t just think only of our client’s personal preferences. We have to always take into consideration what we know about the larger brand team, the brand itself, the company itself, the competition, and the industry. Our recommendations have to be informed by all of those factors, not just by what might make our direct client initially happy.

It follows, then, that our responsibility is to know enough about all of those factors – not only about our immediate client – to use them in our thinking. If you can’t do that already, you need to seriously rethink your work and your research.

And we need to consider that every day. Are we alerting our client to information that’s relevant to them – or are we also adding information that they could be providing to their colleagues throughout the organization? Are we considering just how our work can help them – or how it can fit in with all of the other activities across the brand, and with all other marketing activities on other brands in their portfolio?

We are the ones outside of the organization. It’s our external perspective and creativity that make us vital to our client’s success. We can’t develop tunnel vision.

Don’t forget who your client is: and who else your client is, too.

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

Tess Okura, VP, Account Director, Palio

Like many children of the 70’s, I could rattle off the phone number of every person I knew and other random facts. Learning and memorizing things came easily, but it was a necessity – it was a time when there was no smart phone or Internet to look things up.

Today, however, technology has provided with so much information at our fingertips that our critical thinking skills are often less exercised or, perhaps, are over-stimulated, and that can be dangerous if you want to lead with thoughtful strategic thinking in the pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing space.

Though we’re now incredibly aided by technology, we’re also bombarded with more information than ever before. Everything we do from work to play to interacting with families and friends stimulates our brains, helping us learn and acquire new information each day. Add in the amount of digital information being created through emails, instant messages, blog posts, Web sites, Facebook updates, digital phone calls, podcasts and more, our brains are constantly in overdrive.

Technology has certainly made information more available and accessible, and it offers unprecedented convenience. Many technologies are sold on the promise that it will free up time to help us be more thoughtful and creative thinkers. While Google and ubiquitous access to a variety of media has put a world of knowledge at our fingertips, it may not necessarily be making us any smarter.

The decline of critical thinking skills is one area of concern. Education reporter Trip Gabriel recently discussed the quality of learning in online curriculum, where advocates cite its convenience and critics say that it’s all about saving money.

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and emailed it to his teacher.

Google may help speed the time to answer, but changing the depth and breadth of instruction can be detrimental to developing problem solving skills and memory recall. These proficiencies are important for intellectual development and fostering innovation.

Search efficiency is also changing how we interact. Whereas people might have deliberated at length over a given topic, being able to readily access information lessens the need for debate and argumentation. What’s the point when you can just Google for an answer? This can be potentially limiting because new ideas are born from looking at old concepts in a new light.

Gary Small, professor of Psychiatry and Aging at UCLA School of Medicine has looked at how search is affecting our brains and notes that it’s not making us smart or stupid, but it is changing how we think.  What search does, he says, is change how we use our memory.

Unlike children of the 70’s who had to memorize phone numbers, people today can simply look them up in their handheld device or press a button for speed dial. There is no need for active thinking. However, we still have to pick and choose what we need to remember. Individuals attending an industry trade show need to be able to remember people’s names, what company they work for and if and when they’ve interacted. It would be awkward to need to look up that information on a handheld device.

Our prior experiences, education and ability to activate short-term memory help us search online, but for interacting in the real world, technology can be used to encourage brain fitness. Small suggests activities such as Sudoku puzzles, games and other memory techniques in addition to physical training and healthy living to improve brain efficiency and brain health as we age.

Search and other technologies are indeed changing how we think. The way we use memory is being altered as we move to a society of searchers and gathers. Technology has created a world where information changes quickly, and ideas can be distributed almost instantaneously. Individuals need to develop and nurture critical thinking skills so they can continue to innovate, evaluate information and arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

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

Philip Reynolds, VP, Associate Creative Director, Palio

In our “Client vs. Agency” series, we’ve looked at the differing views that can be taken regarding time, money, expectations and collaboration. Now, we’ll look at creativity.

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

Michele Boxley, Account Director, Palio

Most businesses – certainly, most businesses that have been through a crisis – understand the value of a good disaster plan. Whether you’re an advertising agency like Palio that specializes in pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing, or any other kind of business, when trouble strikes, that’s exactly the wrong time to be sorting out how to talk to customers and the media, or how best to communicate with employees.

So, if we stipulate the value of having a plan in place, then what goes in it? Or, more specifically, how can you leverage the new social, digital and mobile communication tools when disaster strikes? And what should you watch out for? Consider the following:

Have a formal cascade of options. If disaster strikes and you need to communicate with a far-flung workforce, employees should have no question about which channel or tool is the right one for official company updates – that’s a core component of most disaster plans. But, what if your primary tool is damaged or unavailable? Depending on the scenario, it’s possible for email, phones and the company intranet to all be down simultaneously – and that’s when employees need to know what other official options exist.

Keep risk management front and center. The organizational imperative in a crisis is not to communicate with everyone and anyone who wants information – that’s a time sink, a risk and a distraction. Rather, the imperative is to manage risk at every turn. That means looking at social, digital and mobile communication tools through two lenses, at once both weighing their potential to quickly reach a dispersed and mobile workforce, and understanding their potential to generate distracting and counterproductive public chatter in a crisis if not properly managed.

Your vendor’s disaster could be your disaster as well. Many organizations have embraced enterprise-level social collaboration platforms like Socialtext, gaining great benefits from the software-as-a-service model. But, that begs the question: What happens when disaster strikes a core communications vendor? If your organization can’t afford the lost productivity of downtime, go beyond simple service level agreements with strategic communications vendors, and ask to see their actual disaster and business-continuity plans. Not only will you have more insight into their resiliency during a disaster, but you may walk away with ideas for how to better prepare your own organization.

Social and mobile media are an incredible asset in a time of crisis, particularly as today’s workforce gets out of the office and into the field in ever greater numbers. However, “social for the sake of social” is never a good idea – especially in crisis and disaster communications. So, explore your options, but don’t assume anything is a must-do just because social currently gets so much attention.

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

Marcelle Rockwell, VP, Account Director, Palio

Are you an only child who was raised on a desert island by wolves? No?

Then you’ve probably had to work with others over the course of your life to get things done. And, if you’re anything like the rest of us, you’ve had varying levels of success with the process. Sometimes it’s a joy. Sometimes it’s hard work. Most of the time, it’s somewhere in between.

In our professional world of creative marketing agencies and clients, we find that collaborative desires are fairly standard in many ways. Both sides have their ideal image of what collaboration would entail.

Clients would love to have ingenious ideas, perfectly complementary to corporate strategy, completely fleshed out with examples and practical details, falling well within the budget constraints, to be dropped in their lap ten minutes before they ask for them (and sometimes even before they ask).

Agencies would love to have clients who provide extensive detail into their broader brand strategies and long-term goals (which would be secure and unchanging), instant access to all of the stakeholders involved in the approval and execution processes, creative carte blanche unencumbered by regulatory requirements or legal stipulations, and unlimited budgets and flexible timelines to make their dreams reality.

Obviously, these scenarios are seldom the case. Which is why collaboration is key. Negotiation, compromise, diplomacy. And — you may begin to sense a theme across recent posts — communication.

If you can mutually communicate a realistic sense of what to expect before you begin your collaboration, your efforts forward will move that much more swiftly, smoothly, and successfully.

In any collaboration, though, you have to work around the constraints that a partnership poses:

• More than one opinion is at play, and while everyone is working towards the same goal for the brand, there can be vastly different visions about how to reach that goal. Remembering that everyone does have that mutual goal goes a long way toward solving those disagreements
• Your office is not Hogwarts, and no one you’re working with has magical powers. They will not always be able to instantly give you the answers you need; they will not always be able to remove the stumbling blocks that appear in your path; and they will, at some point or another, make a mistake. Being human does that to a person. Reflect, every now and then, on your shared humanity, and use it as an opportunity to build respect rather than frustration
• We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: collaboration requires frequent updates—from both sides. You can work more successfully together when you’re both working toward the same goal on the same activities at the same time. The closer you can stay in synch, the more efficiently you’ll work and the better your results will be

What’s your favorite part of collaboration – the creative brainstorming… the thrill of success… the Happy Hour celebration?

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

Maureen Wendell, VP, Account Director, Palio

Tech pundits have been predicting the death of email for the last several years, but will social media be its killer?

Technology progression isn’t going to change. Just because something new comes along, it doesn’t mean we should start digging the grave on other technologies. The advent of television threatened the existence of radio, but here we are, decades later, still listening to radio, even if our choices abound with satellite stations.

It’s been an awfully long death march for email, but it isn’t going anywhere – at least not in the near future – and it’s still a viable part of the marketing mix. ComScore notes that while Web-based email is on the decline, mobile email is experiencing an uptick – 43.5 million users turn to their mobile devices on a nearly daily basis for their email communication needs.

In addition to remaining a cost-effective solution to drive lead generation efforts and build long-lasting relationships with clients, email is the original social animal. Email supports one-to-one communication, and while not public, it is also a mass communication tool. Thousands of Listservs still exist and messages are broadcast to groups of subscribers. Email is sharable, whether forwarded to an individual network or posted in whole or part on other digital media.

Email also lets you send attachments such as PowerPoint presentations, particularly important for business users sharing confidential collateral. While some social media platforms enable sharing of attachments via private messages, they’re not the most secure way to transmit information. In some cases users sign away their rights to ownership of any material posted, making it property of the social network.

New social media platforms such as Google+ are indeed social and collaborative, but do they offer more capability than email? Writer Brian Storms doesn’t think so. Recently he posted a side-by-side comparison of social media’s newest darling and email, illustrating similar functionality. Plus, how many people still look for their social notifications through email to learn someone responded to a Facebook post or were added to a Google+ circle?

The reality is one medium isn’t going to replace the other – both have an important place in the marketing agenda. However, knowing how and when to communicate with your target audience so your efforts work in your favor, garner more leads and open more lines of communication between you and your contacts is essential. More so, by combining the two, marketers can further extend their message, target communications to specific groups, encourage users to share and forward email through the social networks and capitalize on the many ways to capture their audiences’ attention.

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