When we returned from Cannes, exhausted but full of inspiration, and started talking to our colleagues and clients, there was one question on their lips: How was it? Tell us all about it!
While it’s impossible to distill a fully-packed festival into a short blog (believe us, we tried!), we felt Lions Health could accurately summed up in a word: ‘transformative’.
It provided attendees with the connections, education, benchmarking tools and, most importantly, inspiration to successfully go away and work with clients to deliver cutting edge, creative healthcare communications campaigns. No excuses. Only possibilities.
Of the many noteworthy topics, two have particularly stayed with us since out return:
Connect with the ‘person’ not just the illness
Successful campaigns are the ones that build empathy and touch our emotional, human sides. People living with illnesses don’t want to be seen as a ‘patient’. They want to be seen as the unique individuals that they are and be provided with the tailored, personalised support that will help them live their life optimally.
Presenters throughout the festival reiterated that there is a need to engage with people on this personal level and uncover what is meaningful to them. One insight garnered by AstraZeneca in a community based health programme was that you need to understand human instinct to be able to drive behavioural change. For example, if you teach people with poor diets about nutrition statistics, you are unlikely to convince them to eat better; but if you teach them how to taste and enjoy good-food, they will be more motivated to want to learn to cook and improve their diet.
UNICEF also harnessed this empathic stance when they created the “Strangers no more” campaign to educate people in Pakistan and Afghanistan to vaccinate their children against polio. By shining a light on the work of healthcare professionals in the communities and by starting conversations with the locals about vaccinations, they were able to build trust and accelerate the programme for the polio eradication.
One way of building empathy with people was adding an element of humour, such as the ‘Darryl’ campaign for testicular cancer awareness in South Africa. Knowing that men experienced a significant ‘embarrassment factor’ when discussing testicular health, the campaign used humour in the form of a talking testicle, named Darryl! The initial laugh that came with seeing this hairy little character talking was enough to break the ice for men in the region, and open the possibility for a conversation. It garnered exceptional media coverage, and more importantly drove men to their physician to seek help.
Technology: changing the world of healthcare
We were interested to see that not only healthcare companies were present at Lions Health, but a broad range of technology and software firms.
After attending sessions about the advances that are happening in technology, it was no mystery as to why they were there! The scale and rate of development in the area of wearable technology is staggering. By 2020 it is predicted at 50BN wearable devices will exist global, and by 2025, this is expected to have increased to 500BN.
Another advance come sin the form of ‘data chips’ the size of a blood cell, meaning that injectable technology is a very real possibility in the not too distant future. Speakers even suggested that in next 5-7 years the leading healthcare company will actually be a software company, not a pharma or biotech.
One particular topic that was hotly debated was the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential this has to cause real disruption in healthcare and communications. After all, it was only a few months ago when a leading communications agency hired its first AI creative director. But IBM is going one step further to harness big healthcare data (such as that being collected by the billions of wearable devices globally) and create a solution that will help doctors in choosing a diagnosis and potential treatment for the patient, by just looking at data.
So, are we all being replaced by AI systems in the future? Certainly not! After all, there is no algorithm (yet!) for intuition, for serendipity and for taking risks.
Whether its communications or healthcare, in the future humans will become expert curators of information; they will use AI systems as useful tools to access a wealth of information to support them in making better decisions.
So in summary, the healthcare environment is changing and we need to find creative and impactful ways to harness advances in technology, but make sure that we still put human and emotional needs at the centre of our programming.
We’ll see you next year Cannes!