Wow!
I'm Impressed.
After 11 years of trying to get companies to use the Internet and OBGYN.net for marketing, advertising and education 2007 seems to be the breakthrough year! Things are picking up all over online and ad spends are switching from vertical magazines to online campaigns and initiatives in droves.
Apparently online medical advertising alone is projected to be a 13 billion dollar industry by 2008. I remember back in 1996 when it was a no dollar industry! I remember hearing the heads of big marketing departments of major pharmaceutical companies and bio tech companies saying things like, "I think the Internet might just be a fad", or "Doctors don't use the Internet, especially not Ob/Gyns."
It seemed funny to me now that Ob/Gyn's seemed to be viewed as the late adopters on the Internet, barely possessing upposable thumbs, let alone the savvy to utilize online communications, when I knew through our early gambits at OBGYN.net that nothing could be further from the truth. NVOG was one of the first medical websites in the world to have a fully functional interactive website with a members only component, http://www.nvog.nl/ leave it to the Dutch! It was the brain child of Dr Hans van der Slikke and some other pioneering doctors using a great programmer who could work marvels...if they could keep him sober and off the sauce. They did long enough to get one hell of a website out of him!
The problem really back in those days was not that doctors or at least my specialty, Ob/Gyn , doctors, weren't using the Internet very much, it was that the sales and marketing people weren't using it practically at all yet. We marketing people are notoriously, myself included, bad at technology adoption. Some right brain left brain thing I guess. The doctors were using it, and using it well, long before the people who depend on them for changing the course of women's health care and making their companies a success ever caught on.
To this day I still run into the odd person in marketing or education for a company that sells to/through ob/gyns who will tell me they never heard of OBGYN.net. Now when I hear it I wonder..."if you make your livelihood off of communicating with ob/gyn's wouldn't you think you would ever, just for grins, put the search terms "obstetrics", "gynecology" or "obgyn" into Google?" One would assume they would...but don't! We come up tn the top 3 out of millions of possibilities but some of these marketing people still have never heard of OBGYN.net and proclaim it proudly. Too busy with lofty marketing plans one must presume. Go figure. In a million years they will be fuel oil like the dinosaurs they are. Now they are just being very foolish and making themselves and their companies look antiquated and out of touch to the very market they hope to influence.
Thankfully, now after over a decade, that type of encounter is rare and far between. It is no badge of honor to run marketing for a company that relies on a certain specific constituent group and never even bother to put the name of their specialty in Google and see what pops up. The newer younger PM's and marketing and advertising people cut their teeth online and it is part of how they think and move in the space. We are now experiencing the first generation of professionals that know no other way of communicating besides email and IM and online, taking the positions of authority in companies. The leaders are getting younger. In the not too distant future companies will be run by people who do not remember a time before the internet, much as I at 51 do not remember a time befor TV.
What does it mean for websites like OBGYN.net? Well it's good in a way, but it still is a market working out its kinks. Now that we can measure things more closely expectations tend to be too high. I guess it is a sad day to find out your multimillion dollar ad campaign is falling on deaf ears. It was better when you could throw ads in 3 of the vertical throw-aways and sleep at night assured that your message was seen, absorbed and checked in to the minds of the 38,000 US Ob/Gyn doctors you are charged to reach and influence. Not so good to find out that what you have been saying is either, ill crafted, unimportant, missunderstood or worst of all, no one cares. If the doctors are interested they log on to online information in droves. If they are not, they just don't...and you and you boss are going to have to know it and deal with it!
IMHO the two biggest components to a successful online campaign with ob/gyns, is extremely target email and advertising promotion, and having something educational THAT EFFECTS THEM AND THEIR PRACTICES AND PATIENTS to share with them. If your "agency" made a creative and it is not getting clicked on...get new creative...or a new message...or a new agency. Don't blame the doctors and think they don't use the Internet, or blame the messenger (in this case OBGYN.net) for the failure to connect. Do an online focus group or something to find out why the campaign is falling on its face with Ob/Gyns. Maybe you want them and need them more than they need you. In the world of all the problems they have to deal with for their patients, maybe your problem seems less than top of mind important.
They get hit with a lot of infomation. Make sure yours rings true and important to them. Find the point of connection, on their terms. Not your's or some agency's.
So, that's it for my opinion today. The market is always right. If they don't see value in your offering it is your fault, not theirs. And one more side note...the people that spent the last ten years crafting print campaigns don't necessarily know what works online. Whatever your medical specialty, Ob/Gyn, Cardiology, podiatry...don't call "Waxcapplet, Gooseliver, Vendetta & Prang" because they are "the biggest name in the industry"...put the name of your medical specialty in Google...find out who comes up in the top 5 or ten returns, then call them and find out what they are doing riggt, and how your company can leverage of that positioning.
Roberta
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