I wrote this a year an a half ago for a public relations journal; the editor asked "what keeps you up at night. It seems as current today as when I wrote it. (I am still not sure whether this blog is going to focus on professional or personal matters; but it seems a lot safer--for now--to cover professional PR matters.
What keeps you up at night? As an agency executive practicing in the health care arena, you recognize that this is an epochal time and perhaps the first time in the brief history of marketing-oriented pharmaceutical PR that forces outside our control threaten the core of our business. How we individually and as an industry respond over the next year or two may very well determine the future growth and prosperity of pharmaceutical public relations.
Government regulation isn’t the bogyman, nor is the health care industry’s reputation. We’ve met those challenges before. The hurdles now facing us are unique and are outgrowths of a health care industry facing its own economic challenges. They include (1) increasing competition from other marketing disciplines, (2) clients’ drive for more accountability and efficiency and ironically, (3) consumers assuming more responsibility for health care decisions. Let me explain.
As everyone is aware, there is increasing pressure on advertising agencies and other communications disciplines to grow both their revenues and their margins. Faced with woes such as criticism of direct-to-consumer advertising, lack of new products to launch and skepticism about the objectivity of continuing medical education programs, ad agencies, medical education firms and others are looking at how they can create patient awareness of diseases and therapy alternatives using non-advertising channels. Their recommendations often look and feel a lot like those lodged in the public relations realm, if you accept that the main responsibility of PR is managing dialogue between a company and its publics.
One needs only to scan BrandWeek or Ad Age to see examples of advertising sidling up to social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, tools that public relations also embraces. Ten years ago public relations agencies hoped they would control the development of Web sites. That was not to be, as very specialized agencies, often under the wing of ad agencies, seized that business sector. Could the time come when clients look to advertising agencies exclusively for social media, alliance building and loyalty management programs, relegating public relations to meat-and-potatoes media relations?
Under this scenario, public relations would not help set strategy or manage “the big picture.” This is a formula for industry commoditization, not growth.
Thinking about this, you toss fitfully, eyeing the alarm clock.
Related to the challenge coming from other disciplines is our client’s desire for accountability across each marketing engagement. We have beaten to death the observation that clients want to see greater return-on-investment. PR departments and their agencies are trying to address this; agencies in particular claim proprietary ways to measure campaign effectiveness and cost efficiency, each claiming that it has the loadstone. But until there are generally accepted industry standards for measurement, their claims will lack true stopping power. This is a lesson the advertising industry learned long ago.
Accountability also means clients are learning to be more strategic in their public relations spending. Some ask for holding company solutions, saying that they will award a global holding company their communications contracts, expecting that the brightest minds at the parent company level will manage their business. Great if you are Omnicom or WPP, not so good if you are a small independent shop. It’s also great if you have uncovered exactly how your holding company solution will offer the client greater service at less cost. But that’s not easy.
On the other extreme, clients also are recognizing that even the best agency is not best at everything, and they are parsing their business among generalist and specialty firms. So-and-so may be the agency of record, but another company that has built unique expertise in, say, reimbursement tactics will handle that job.
Many clients are zero-based budgeting their public relations accounts, saying, “never mind what we gave you last year, what is needed to do very specific tasks this year.” Starting from scratch can mean scratching for dimes.
Again, you stare at the ceiling, wondering if you can get by on just five hours sleep.
Finally, our clients recognize that economics is weighing very heavily on consumer choice. We all support greater consumer involvement with health care decision-making. However, as the price tag for wellness increases, consumer involvement will also mean sharing responsibility for the cost of care. We are already seeing insurance companies instituting multiple co-pay levels for medicines. You shell out $10.00 monthly for a generic remedy, perhaps $25.00 for one type of branded drug, and up to $45.00 for a super premium pill. Co-pays for new medications may zoom to $75.00 in the near future. As the patient pays more each month, will he or she be as receptive to traditional media placements or celebrity “endorsements?” I may adore Sally Field, but if I can get adequate treatment at a fraction of the cost of the drug she is promoting, her seal of approval will mean little to me.
Public relations—particularly health care agencies—needs to break out of its knee-jerk celebrity infatuation and focus more on the actual drivers of consumer behavior.
None of these issues need be fatal to public relations practitioners. They do mean, however, that challenges have to be addressed without business-as-usual solutions. They mean demonstrating how PR approaches communications problems in ways that smartly separate our discipline from advertising; they mean creating easily understood accountability systems and mean looking not simply at the traditional bag of PR tricks, but rather looking at what it will take to effectively convince patients and consumers to ask a question or take an action or for physicians to prescribe a brand. That’s a lot to think about but if you manage these risks, at night, you can sleep easier.
# # #
No comments:
Post a Comment