“As a scientist, I don’t care about you, I care about the people you care about.” – Dr John Roberts (dotdash.com)
One of the key trends at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival was data use. In a world of exponentially growing data mines available in health and wellbeing, how do we interpret it and what do we do with it? That’s the question on the minds of agencies and clients alike. Data is changing the way that we discover and develop medications, how we deliver healthcare and how we engage people in their own health. Data is central to the revolution in personalised healthcare, a movement that will see health care professionals able to pinpoint the right drugs for the right patient.
This ties into a bigger trend in health and wellness: people are waking up to the power of data in designing, delivering and targeting the message as well as the medicine. Data can inform not just what we communicate, but when we should deliver it, and to whom. For example, we are different people every time we surf the internet – time of day plays a huge role, and dips in health searches routinely occur on Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Online health searches surge by 75% on January 1st. But how do we use this information to inform communications planning?
One talk that really made us think came from Dr John Roberts of dotdash.com. Roberts shared insights in his Cannes presentation that were mined from fairly simple data analysis of online consumption, specifically consumption of cancer information. For example, interest in prostate cancer is more predictive of age than gender, and almost half the readers of cancer topics are under 25. Digging deeper, the vast amount of searching on prognosis and life-expectancy in cancer is by the under-25’s. So, the health of the people around you is a huge driver in the kind of health information you consume – and nowhere is the seen more than in the case of women. In fact, a woman’s age is best predicted by the health of her family. If someone is searching for information about dementia and assisted care, they are pretty much guaranteed to be a woman aged 45.
Data can be illuminating but to make it to work for us in strategic comms we need to ask the right questions. Dr Roberts suggested starting with an assumption: ask yourself what would prove you wrong, and then using analytics to test it. This simple piece of advice is one we’ve already put into practice in new business pitches since returning from the festival, to great effect.
My favourite quote of the week was this: “Pharma is just fumbling with the bra straps of technology”. It captures the sentiment that as an industry, we do not yet fully appreciate how transformative tech and data are – we’re inexperienced, and our technique needs refinement. We need to look outside of health and wellness for inspiration, and to fully grasp how technology can capture and predict trends. Ultimately, using data intelligently will deliver immediate insights that can be creatively packaged to tell a powerful story; a story that changes both minds and behaviour.
A great example of intelligent data use in a communications campaign is the Tweeting Pothole, a Panamanian initiative presented at Cannes. Faced with the challenge of harnessing public outrage at the state of the roads and the need to get Government to do something about it, an agency placed sensors in every pothole in downtown Panama. Whenever they were driven over, these potholes immediately tweeted a message to key Government officials, the press and other policy influencers. The before and after photos of the roads are a powerful and simple testimony to the power and simplicity of the project! And it represents just:: one of the take homes from a Cannes weekend jam-packed with thought-provoking talks, showcases of super cool initiatives that looked at challenges from a new perspective and new personal connections that are already inspiring us in our work with clients.
Check back for more blogs soon, where we’ll cover the ideas discussed at Cannes in more depth! And if you missed our first blog, you can read it here.