IPG Health: when lives are at stake storytelling is key

HEALTH pervades every aspect of our lives. If you don’t have good health or access to good healthcare, it doesn’t matter how much power, fame or money you have — or how many awards you bag on the Cannes Lions stage. And that surely makes healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing a uniquely valuable, challenging and accountable business.

“If you approach healthcare correctly, it can help heal not just individuals but society as whole,”

Novartis’ Jason Young (left) and IPG Health’s Mike Guarino

“If you approach healthcare correctly, it can help heal not just individuals but society as whole,” said Mike Guarino, chief commercial officer of IPG Health, the New York City-headquartered collective of 50-plus healthcare-marketing agencies employing some 6,000 people across the world. “But you can only do that if you bring together diverse teams of multidisciplined talent focused on a common goal.”

Proof that IPG Health’s network does this very well came on Monday night — not only was it named Healthcare Network of the Year, but its agency, Area 23, was awarded Healthcare Agency of the Year, and then went on to win Gold and Silver Health & Wellness Lions for ‘Zip Code Exam’.

The first health report for communities, the campaign for the Equality Health Foundation allows residents to calculate their life expectancy based on where they live, and turn this data into action by sending their findings to their local leaders. But as gratifying as it is to win acco- lades in Cannes, that’s not why “we wake up every day and do what we do”, said Jason Young, vice-president and head of marketing at Swiss pharmaceutical multinational and IPG Health client Novartis.

“For us, it’s about our impact on patients’ lives. And we’ve come to understand that creativity is the key that unlocks greater engagement and impact.”

Historically, Young added, health- care and pharmaceutical marketing have been treated as different to other forms of marketing, a view fostered by the highly regulated nature of the pharmaceutical mar- ket. “That limited our thinking,” Young said. “We told ourselves that creativity would somehow soften the seriousness of condi- tions we treat or the medicines we make. But we’re now learning that, no, creativity — storytelling, in particular — is core when health and lives are at stake. Being able to articulate emotion is the best way to cut through the clutter and get through to heart of a subject that’s at the core of humanity. So we’re starting to ask not what’s allowed, but what’s possible.”