Agencies are going all in on healthcare marketing

Here’s a fast fact: 63% of Gen Z and 61.5% of millennial social media users followed or engaged with health influencers on social, according to a 2023 eMarketer survey.

These influencers aren’t necessarily the dancing teenyboppers that might come to mind. They’re people of all ages posting about a variety of health conditions and diseases, in some cases accruing large followings of users seeking information from seemingly credible or relatable sources.

Agencies have taken notice, and a number of them debuted new healthcare marketing offerings this year, including several centered on influencer marketing, to help brands navigate the evolving landscape.

“We live in that review culture, so we’re seeking validation constantly for our health choices,” Ansley Williams, Ogilvy’s head of influencer marketing in North America, who helps run its Global Health Influence offering that debuted in April.

Strength in numbers

For some agencies within holding companies, creating new healthcare offerings has been useful in helping to break down barriers between sister agencies to build stronger services for clients. That’s the case with WPP’s Burson, which in May debuted Trufluence x HCP (which stands for healthcare professional). The offering utilizes Decipher Health, a cognitive AI audience modeling tool that can measure the potential impact of different kinds of content on audiences interested in topics like oncology, diabetes, and sexual health.

Trufluence x HCP can use the tool to evaluate the credibility of content or how likely it is to inspire engagement, and the agency says it does not collect personally identifiable information and uses HIPAA-compliant tools. . Since Decipher Health is a part of WPP’s cross-agency operating system, WPP Open, it “allows us to collaborate across the WPP family,” Vicky Lewko, global head of digital health at Burson, said.

In August, IPG debuted Mediabrands Health aimed at serving pharma clients by creating campaigns that reach physicians and patients. It’s designed to be a “center of excellence,” according to global president of IPG Mediabrands Health Melissa Gordon-Ring, and it builds on existing offerings like IPG Health and IPG Mediabrands.

“Our goal here was not creating an additional agency or a specialized agency,” Gordon-Ring said. It’s really about breaking down barriers across Mediabrands to allow us to provide best practices and processes and leverage our talent in the service of each business that we work with, and expanding and ideally partnering with new companies in the future."

Mediabrands Health works with other IPG offerings like Acxiom Health, which builds data layers for clients and has a data spine spanning HIPAA-compliant audience data on over 250 million consumers, according to the company. Acxiom also has data that it uses to help clients reach roughly 6.5 million US healthcare providers, like doctors, nurses, hospital systems, social workers, and others. Mediabrands Health works with Acxiom on both DTC campaigns and HCP-focused ones.

Circle of influence

Some of the healthcare marketing offerings focused on influencers are helping brands navigate an increasingly saturated space as newer channels like online health communities, health apps, and telehealth grow, Williams said. Ogilvy tends to reach out to influencers who have already publicly disclosed medical information, according to the agency.

Ogilvy looks at audience data to help determine which influencers certain demographics may respond to when matching clients with influencers. The agency is working with clients like AbbVie, the biotech company behind prescription drugs like Lexapro, and Haleon, which manufactures Tums and Advil, Ogilvy Head of Influence and Social Strategy Juliana DiBona said.

“If you’re trying to reach a 60-year-old consumer, you’d…have to look at the influencers’ audience data on who actually reaches that 60-year-old,” Williams said. “It might be a mirror reflection. It might be another 60-year-old talking to another 60-year-old, or it could be someone else that just appeals to that consumer.”

Ogilvy put its influencer marketing chops to use for CeraVe earlier this year when the agency helped match the skin-care brand with influencers to support its Super Bowl spot starring Michael Cera. To help support the campaign, Ogilvy tapped Instagram and TikTok dermatology influencers, Williams said, including Nkem Ugonabo, a dermatologist who posts skin-care tips to her 11,000+ TikTok followers.

Burson’s Trufluence x HCP offering uses Decipher Health to help determine whether a specific influencer in the health space will resonate with a brand’s audience using a “potential for impact” score, Lewko said. It also looks to online communities dedicated to various medical conditions to help them engage with influencers that may already be resonating with people affected by those health conditions. It’s working with clients in categories including oncology and cardiometabolic diseases, among others.

“There are certain communities, [like those for] diabetes and rare disease…that are really active online,” she said. “That helps us to determine how we’re going to engage with influencers because there already is a robust community where that engagement is already happening.”

The plot thickens

There are still other changes happening in the healthcare industry that healthcare marketing offerings are helping guide brands through, like consumer privacy laws that can vary by state, Gordon-Ring said. And the rise of semaglutide GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, is opening up new opportunities for marketing.

“I think the GLP-1 conversation has touched everyone because of the ramifications in terms of just how that community engages,” she said.