By

Rico Cipriaso, SVP, Digital Strategy and Transformation
and Eric Ong, VP, Technical Director, Concentric Health Experience 

AR and mixed-reality are powerful tools for enhancing visualizations for patients and providers in healthcare marketing.

More immersive digital experiences can drive empathy, helping accurately model experiences and expected outcomes.  

Scaling AR experiences to platforms consumers actively engage with is the top executional barrier for today’s brands. 

Healthcare brands are ripe for the AR and mixed-reality revolution.

Everyone frets about their health. For someone newly diagnosed with a mispronounceable disease, picking up a prescription from the pharmacy for the first time is the culmination of multiple steps of worry, research, and grappling with challenging content. The pill or injection they receive is a reminder of hope and the possibility of a positive outcome. What if we could reinforce that hope with an experience that truly brings to life the sources of life-changing solutions?   

Imagine: a routine scan from your mobile device at the start of your treatment unlocks a window into information about the disease, expected outcomes, and the support you need to get through it. With augmented and mixed-reality, healthcare brands have an opportunity to create dynamic visualizations for patients and providers that arm them with the education to drive better experiences and empathy to drive positive outcomes. AR/VR will help enhance both B2B and B2C efforts. 

Aiding Modern Education

Precision and depth of understanding are essential for healthcare practitioners. With AR and mixed-reality, these professionals’ learning tools can be enhanced with more multi-spatial visualizations of the body, cell and chemical interactions, and more, giving providers the confidence to act decisively in treatment. 

We’ve seen that spirit extend beyond university and medical school settings; throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public health professionals and medical influencers collaborated on mobile AR data visualization to help people better make sense of the large amounts of evolving COVID-19 data. Applying simple AR layers to social content can help bring life to flat charts with 3D animation, ultimately driving a more digestible and interactive educational experience. 

Driving Empathy Through Enhanced Experiences 

We know emotional appeal is the magic sauce of good marketing. Enabling more immersive healthcare brand experiences in B2B and B2C with mixed-reality can give brands the tools to emulate patients’ experiences, model the impact of new drugs, products, and services, and help translate patients’ lived experiences. In our award-winning work for Sunovion, we leveraged VR to bring Lonhala Magnair’s in-person, interactive “Room to Breathe” to more healthcare providers. We rendered the home of a user of the drug in VR to showcase how each room of the house reflects the product’s unique features, including nigh silent administration, quick nebulization time, and convenient audiovisual feedback. The campaign grabbed the attention of prospective targets in an eye-catching way and helped place them in the patient’s shoes. 

These mixed-reality approaches can also arm those suffering from chronic health ailments with tools for better communicating their needs and experiences. Excedrin’s 2016 Migraine Experience VR campaign used mixed-reality to model the audio, visual, and spatial effects a migraine can have on a patient, adding an experiential layer that helped drive added empathy. Their effort went beyond the VR headset experience to include a mobile app version that let anyone share the experience with loved ones. With the world returning to the office from remote work, healthcare brands will have many opportunities to generate compelling mixed-reality content about navigating and advocating for support in this evolving health environment. 

Finally, B2B healthcare marketers exhibiting at trade shows can integrate mixed-reality into their product demonstrations and showcases to enhance the persuasive element of their presentations.

What to do? 

1. Think beyond a standard deliverables list, to envision impact first. 
2. Seek partners that understand the current martech landscape wand are committed to experimenting with new storytelling methods. 
3. Always develop a plan and allocate funds for extensive testing. 

Exciting possibilities await healthcare brands with mixed-reality, but executional barriers remain, from closed Martech platforms that don’t yet allow AR or VR executions to the difficulty of getting mixed-reality experiences into the hands of target audiences. Rolling out an AR or VR experience now often means introducing a new platform to consumers – and we know consumers find difficulty in leaving an already-familiar walled garden. As a result of this, while the idea behind an experience may be great, brand efforts end up shifting from building more engaging experiences to solving the issue of sourcing new products and tech solutions to make mixed-reality. Realistically, brands will need to create these experiences on apps and platforms their consumer bases already engage with, or the bar is high for scaling adoption. 

The good news: more investment in mobile mixed-reality makes this a ripe time to experiment with these new digital marketing tools to ensure your brand is prepared to leverage emerging mediums of storytelling and consumer connections. 

Now is the time to stretch your creative possibility and think beyond a standard deliverables list to envision impact first. Being able to experience healthcare solutions is more potent than simply knowing about them – how can you use mixed-reality to drive more effective marketing? 

Second, seek partners that understand the current martech landscape and are committed to exploring how newer storytelling mediums unlocked by emerging technology integrate into omnichannel marketing efforts. Be critical about whom you work with: they should be conversant in the potential of mixed-reality while nursing a healthy skepticism for the tactics needed to scale consumer adoption.

This leads to our final advice: always ask your mixed-reality partners to develop to plan and allocate funds for extensive testing. Because of the high engagement barrier inherent in these solutions, you want to ensure your brand comes to your customers with a fine-tuned, new and expansive way of telling your story, absent any kinks in the user experience.

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Annual awards ceremony hosted by the 4A’s, the industry’s leading trade association, recognizes excellence in marketing strategy

NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — (NASDAQ:STGW): Stagwell today announced three of its agencies, Anomaly, Colle McVoy, and 10 Thousand Design, received recognition at the 2021 Jay Chiat Awards, an annual celebration of the best strategic thinking in marketing, media and advertising around the world. The awarded campaigns include work for MELĒ Skincare, Obie, and Houston White, and illustrate the transformative value for clients and consumers when marketing strategy blends purposeful creative with keen consumer insights.

“Our network knows that a smart strategic insight can be the differentiator between bottom-of-the-barrel creative work and the kind of transformative marketing that moves culture — and the consumer,” said Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO, Stagwell. “I am proud that every one of this year’s winners takes that spirit of innovation and brings it to bear against real-world issues.”

Anomaly received three awards at this year’s ceremony, including:

Gold Award for National Strategy and a Bronze Award for Product/Service Creation Strategy for its campaign “A Scientific Breakthrough: The Science of Melanin-rich Skin,” created in partnership with MELĒ Skincare, a Unilever brand. Recognizing that while skincare marketing has evolved to include diverse figures, the products themselves have not, the team partnered with Unilever to create MELE, a new skincare brand designed to fill the void of products designed for darker shades of skin. Within 6 months of launch, 5 of 7 MELĒ Skincare products received competitive awards from major publications, and all available products received above 4.6 stars and over 1000 positive customer reviews.

Silver Award for Healthcare Strategy awarded for Anomaly’s partnership with BabyMed founder Dr. Amos Grunebaum to conceive and create Obie, a first-of-its kind fertility and pregnancy app that helps couples identify barriers to pregnancy and manage their fertility journeys. Anomaly led product positioning, development of the business model, and brand strategy, design, and identity. Anomaly collaborated with YML, another agency in the Stagwell network, to build the digital product.

Additionally, Minneapolis-based creative agency Colle McVoy and design firm 10 Thousand Design shared an honorable mention in the Product/Service Creation Strategy category for their work with Houston White, which unifies the entrepreneur’s community hub, retail space, and apparel and accessories businesses under one brand, “Houston White Men’s Room.” The agencies’ expertise and insights helped bolster the brand and design work, delivering a final identity that positions HWMR for national growth.

The Jay Chiat awards are hosted annually by the 4A’s, the advertising industry’s foremost trade association. Anomaly and Colle McVoy have both won the award in previous years.

Last month, MDC Partners Inc. and Stagwell Marketing Group LLC combined to form Stagwell, the challenger holding company built to transform marketing.

About Stagwell Inc.
Stagwell is the challenger holding company built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing.  Led by entrepreneurs, our 10,000+ specialists in 24+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients

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“YML is the agency built for transformation in the year everything changed.” That’s a line from the agency’s Ad Age A-List submission and we couldn’t have said it better.

During 2020, the MDC Partners digital production and design agency brought on 12 new clients, hired 150 people and increased revenue 60% as it worked with marketers such as  Kaiser Permanente, Thrive Market and State Farm to rethink and reshape their businesses during the pandemic, including how they interact with consumers.

YML created for Kaiser Permanente a user interface for telehealth designed to “provide a seamless transition from in-person healthcare to a remote digital experience,” resulting in a 33% increase in user engagement on a redesigned app. For State Farm, it built a new digital platform enabling easier access to services like roadside assistance and accident repair. And for Thrive Market, YML implemented a data-driven customized and personalized experience for online shoppers that increased first-time orders by 16%.

Led by CEO Ashish Toshniwal, the Redwood City, California-based agency says that 40% of its employees are BIPOC and its executive team is 30% female. Its team is made up of 65% technologists, 25% designers, 10% product strategists who are diverse geographically; its last hands-on call had 150 people from six continents, more than 20 countries, and 16 U.S. states.

YML isn’t a traditional choice for this list; but this year has been anything but traditional. “Many of our competitors are essentially the digital side of Madison Avenue,” says YML. “They will sell clients with a fancy deck, front-load research and strategy, and then six to 12 months later comes ‘the work.’ YML is the Silicon Valley, outcome-driven, digital product company balancing and blending sexy design with cutting-edge technology; all while, critically, driving business impact.”

(Source: Ad Age)