Transcript:
John Mangano (JM): Hello and welcome to the Deep Podcast. Deep is a new podcast focusing on innovation and leadership in health marketing and how it improves people's lives. My name is John Mangano. I'm an advertising analytics wonk. I've been turning numbers into stories and insights about how media can have a positive impact on people's health. I've been a marketer for over two decades — since internet advertising was just being born — and through some very good luck, I found an opportunity to use my expertise to advise leading brands and agencies in health and pharma. And I fell in love with the space.
Why a health marketing podcast? Because health and pharma marketing is so different from every other kind of marketing. It's a high-growth category with unique challenges, including different regulations and restrictions, constant change, and leadership that's passionate about the people they serve.
The thing about this space — the reason I love it — is that at the end of the day, the people in the industry know: if we're successful in our marketing, we don't just sell widgets, we improve and even save lives. And that's the driving energy behind everything we do. So Deep is the show about innovation and leadership in health marketing and how it improves people's lives. It's about the passion of people who turn change into opportunity and marketing into real impact.
That's why I've asked Melissa Gordon-Ring to be my guest on this very first episode. Melissa is the Global President of Health at Initiative Media. She has been a highly influential force within health and pharma marketing for the last 15 years, at Starcom, PHD, MEC, Saatchi, and more. Melissa is legendary in the way she artfully expresses the opportunities and challenges that pharma and health marketers face today. Welcome, Melissa, and thanks for joining us at the launch of our podcast.
Melissa Gordon-Ring (MGR): First of all, thank you so much. I'm honored to be the first guest. I'll make it my fun fact when people ask me in the future about something interesting I've done recently.
JM: So you've done a lot of amazing things in your career, but tell us a little about yourself. What are some of the things unrelated to work that you find most interesting, and that give you great pleasure and joy?
MGR: Number one is the fact that I have a six-year-old daughter who's going on 21. She's the joy of my life, and she keeps me on my toes, to say the least. I actually have her first-grade orientation later today, so that's a pretty exciting day.
Some of the other things I enjoy: I try to keep learning. I listen to as many things as I can, and I try to take individual courses, even if it's just one class here or there. But my latest thing that I'm most excited about is that it's gardening season. During Covid, I decided — having grown up in Brooklyn and never lived in a real house until now (I live in Westfield, New Jersey) — that I love gardening and my "plant babies." The first year was incredible. I grew way too much, and I joked that if my marriage survived the harvest, it would be a good thing. But yeah, later today we're going to be replanting my little plant babies into their pots outside. So I'm excited about that.
JM: Does your six-year-old join you in the gardening?
MGR: Oh, she loves it. We joke about the first time she actually ate a green bean — because I didn't even know they grew on a bush — and I stood up and said, "We are living off the land. We are officially farmers." So she has her own legitimate little gardening kit and gardening gloves, so she can feel like she's really helping. I've got a bunch of things she can do while I'm doing the "legit" gardening, so she feels like she's helping.
JM: You learn so much from your kids. You'd think you learned a lot from your parents, and then as a parent you start to realize they were learning as much from you as you were learning from them.
MGR: A hundred percent. I think I learn from her every day — even if it's about patience.
JM: Yes.
MGR: If we're talking about "Deep," there we go.
JM: Definitely. What I find interesting is they're so much smarter — the way they do math is different, I can't even help them with math anymore. And the level of classes my daughter has already taken far exceeds what I took in undergrad, or even my master's program. It's amazing what they're able to learn today and how they're able to do things.
MGR: Amazing.
JM: Tell us, what does your day-to-day look like?
MGR: My day-to-day changes. I think that's what's so exciting about this business and my job — every day I'm meeting with different clients, having conversations with my teams and with industry partners, and trying to help people solve problems and give them the support, or the air cover, they need to do their jobs the best way possible.
JM: So you lead a big team, and when you look at that team, we have a lot of different characters and personalities. In the health space, I think it takes a lot of types of people to accomplish the things we do. When you look at a team, what inspires you most about them, and what do you look for that will ultimately make someone successful in this space?
MGR: That's a great question, because you're right, I do have a bit of a cast of characters, and I love them all equally. They each bring a unique sense of leadership to their teams. What I love most about them, though, is their passion for healthcare. So many of them have longstanding careers in healthcare, but even some newer people — like strategy leads who just started working in healthcare in the past few years — at first said, "I'm not sure I want to work in pharma." Now they're our biggest advocates and champions.
I love that they also challenge me with recommendations, or challenge me to help them in new and different ways. They're all empowered in a way that creates great energy for leading their teams and partnering with their clients — because every client is different, but so many of them are experiencing similar issues, problems, and growing pains.
Our clients — we want to push them to do well, but we also have to figure out new ways to partner. The other thing about my team is that they're all creative. There's no perfect cookie-cutter solution for anything. I've always joked that within pharma and healthcare, we have to be more strategic and more creative than everybody else, because for us a simple answer isn't the right answer — we have to dig in, understand, and abide by so many different policies and regulations to get things done. That requires us to be more creative.
JM: I think oftentimes we hear from colleagues, "Oh, it's harder, we're five years behind." But I think we're often much further ahead, because of the things we're able to do and know how to do. I've had people in other verticals come to me and say, "I'm in financial services — how did you do this?" because it's a lot like what they can't do now, and we're successful here.
So when you look at your career — you've been in advertising across a lot of different sectors — what have you brought over from those sectors that has helped you in health? And then, what are the things that are just plain different and more advanced?
MGR: From other sectors, I've brought being unafraid — not being afraid to make clients a little uncomfortable by asking harder questions. I think one of the things my teams and I have learned is that the jobs we have now are very different than the jobs we had yesterday, two years ago, five years ago. We have to be willing and open to being a different type of leader and client partner than ever before. We need to be in our clients' business, not just leading it.
I think that's the first part of your question — would you mind asking the second part again, John? I apologize.
JM: Fundamentally, when you look at health, how is it different, and where can those of us who are health marketers apply those differences to exceed expectations, find patients, and achieve the goals of our campaigns?
MGR: Persistent — with a capital P. Don't be afraid, don't be deterred. It's about finding the right way to move things forward, because in healthcare, an inch can move a mile. It's the small changes that have the biggest impact. And then we get to be super proud of the fact that we didn't give up — it just means we have to create something new.
JM: That's a great point. When you look at it, that persistence isn't about selling sneakers or something similar — it's actually giving someone hope, making their life better, and in some cases saving their lives. That persistence has a much bigger payoff; it's also so much more important. You wouldn't want anyone to not be persistent if it involved a condition affecting someone you cared about. So in a way, we owe it to them.
MGR: I a hundred percent agree. I have monthly town halls with the entire health team, and I always end them the same way: a big thank you for all that you do. The reality is, I feel honored that we have this opportunity to do the job we do — but more importantly, if we do our job well, we help patients and physicians feel a little more in control of something they don't have control over. That's the thing I try to hit home in a way people can really understand — that it's not clinical. If we do our job well, we can connect people to something, or help them learn a little more about options they may not have realized they had.
JM: You bring up a good point — you used the word "learning." I don't know that any of us, if we're not schooled in healthcare, would know much about the conditions we ultimately face. There aren't many resources to learn about them — I guess you could search online, but you first have to even know that you have a condition. I think the first place people might hear about that is actually through pharma advertising.
MGR: It's true. I think we wear numerous hats as pharma marketers, and we have to be prepared to own that — making sure we have the right resources to answer questions and direct patients and physicians to the right material and information, information that's correct, understandable, and approachable. I think that's part of our duty as well.
JM: That's a great point. So when you look at where we are now, there's a lot going on in marketing, whether it's healthcare marketing or not — the media landscape is changing pretty dramatically. Television has been the mainstay of media since the fifties. Yes, we have digital now, and that's well established, but now CTV is going through its own transition, and there's more to it than that — there are data changes, legal changes, and shifts in how we do social marketing. What are the things that get you most excited? If you had to name your top five as a health marketer, what would they be?
MGR: Speed. Speed across the board — the speed of change, the speed of our ability to learn and optimize, speed to market. We're getting things to market faster than we've ever been able to before. Speed through the lens of transformation, and our ability to make real differences in patients' lives faster. One of my clients talks about "patients are waiting" — I look at things through that lens, specifically around speed and what that really means.
Then there's technology — everyone's talking about AI, but for the right reasons: how does it help us connect patients to information and prescriptions faster? Technology in terms of reporting on the things that actually matter — how will it let us build templates and dashboards that simplify work, so our teams can spend more time on the real strategic problems we're trying to solve?
And then there's content. What is content now? Where is content? It's absolutely everywhere. How we push this industry to think differently about what content looks like — in a way that puts patients and HCPs first — is what I'm hopeful for. We've been talking about dynamic content and omnichannel for a number of years now; that was the big word. But the reality is: how do we ensure we're delivering content in the right places, at the right time, and — more importantly — with the right message? There's a ton of opportunity, and honestly, I feel like I learn something new every day. Those are the things that get me excited.
JM: Where do you think the biggest challenges are — the things that might keep us from achieving those goals?
MGR: We get in our own way. We absolutely get in our own way. It's interesting — I work with so many different healthcare and pharma marketers, and everyone is going through a state of transformation and change. Change is hard, and it can be uncomfortable, but staying true to the goal is the best thing we can do, so we don't get in our own way.
The other thing is making sure we're — "afraid" isn't quite the right word, but hesitant — especially with all the new privacy regulations and their evolution, everything happening on a market-by-market basis. How are we empowering people to say, "Yes, you can speak to me," or "No, you can't"? Those are critical things we have to lock arms on as marketers, because interpretations differ, and that doesn't help anyone. We have to be as consistent as possible.
JM: And I don't know that we even know what the future looks like. We have 50 states, and I think the only thing they can agree on is that they don't want to agree on what the privacy regulations should be.
MGR: Exactly.
JM: And with ad tech, there may be changes in technology — or maybe not, and we just don't know. It appears to be coming, but then it keeps getting delayed in ways that create uncertainty.
MGR: It's true. This cookie conversation has been going on forever. But I've always said, from the beginning, that we as pharma marketers can be "cookie-proof" for a very long time. We haven't been able to target people the way non-healthcare marketers have for so long — we understand the nuances and the things that help us better identify who we want to speak to. We've been talking about this with clients for a number of years, so I think we're set up for success. I'm just ready for them to rip the bandage off. Let's not talk about it anymore — let's actually do it, because only by doing it will we force the hands of those who are dragging their feet.
JM: I think change is inevitable, and those of us who are prepared for it look forward to it, because we know what we have to do.
MGR: Once this is done, there'll be something else.
JM: So if you were to look into your crystal ball — thinking about our kids, when they're adults, maybe our age — what do you think health marketing will look like? How will it have changed, whether they're in the industry or experiencing it as consumers or healthcare providers? What would their experience be, different from what we're seeing and participating in today?
MGR: Personalization. When I think about the future, and about my daughter, your daughter — how they'll be spoken to, or even thought of, in the future — it's truly going to be about personalization: what really matters to them. I'm hopeful that our messages will be more succinct and direct, focused on the things that are more important and relevant to them on a daily basis. Ideally, that's the evolution of communications and the actual copy and requirements healthcare marketers work with.
Everyone has access to the internet now; everyone can look up side effects and other information and do research anywhere. So having real conversations, and the ability to personalize in a way that prompts the conversation, is what I'm most hopeful for. I also think, ideally, they'll have access to all their own healthcare information at their fingertips, so they can make informed decisions in real time.
JM: I think you're right. When you think about personalization and where we're going — the data sets have been around for a while, and I think it even extends into therapies. If you look at clinical trials today, there may be 5,000 people in a trial. That's hard to compare to the level of detail marketers get when we have samples of 50 million people we're marketing to and learning about. This is something that's always been floating in the back of my mind: if you took a dataset like what IQVIA or Symphony has, you could start to identify — based on lifestyle and all the KPIs they track, such as ethnicity, age, weight, BMI, comorbidities, and treatments — trends showing that maybe two seemingly similar drugs work better for men versus women, or for different ethnic groups.
Simply because we're talking about science and genetics, and it is different. At the highest level, we could learn something from all of this at a very granular, one-to-one level, and give HCPs that information at their fingertips — where AI is telling them, "Okay, John Mangano, based on all these things — he's a redhead, he has this, this, and this — he's more likely to be at risk for an adverse event with this brand; put him on that brand instead." I'm not sure we're there yet, but I think the technology and the data are there to support it. That's a big opportunity, because it allows HCPs to have better conversations — to proactively discuss things with their patients — and gets us to a place we've never seen today. We think we're in a good spot now, but I think we're going to look back and realize, "Wow, that's the way we used to look at the 1950s."
MGR: Yeah, that's a good point. As you were talking, something else came to me — as I think about what I hope for the future, specifically for our children, I'm hopeful it's more about prevention. Maybe it's just where I've been looking on Instagram or in my social feed, but I'm seeing more about this concept of proactively going to get a scan — going in and doing X, Y, Z to see if there's anything you wouldn't necessarily know about unless you did a full-body scan, just as an example.
I think there's an opportunity in prevention that we're not harnessing, because a number of disease states are actually preventable — part of the goal is to end something before it starts. If we really focused on our ability to end things that could be prevented, I think we'd get a lot more credit as an industry. And the reality is, we can talk about prevention, but a lot of these things are going to happen whether we prevent them or not. Through prevention, though, there's greater education, and it can create a more fluid, frictionless journey to treatment if patients are more aware of that entire progression.
JM: How often does prevention come up when you speak with clients or at industry events?
MGR: Not that often, except for a few specific disease states. We're so focused on treatment, which makes sense, but the prevention piece is like the "pre-journey." I do think education is a continuum, and behavioral change is tough — but starting conversations in a new and different way may be something we see in the future.
JM: Yeah, absolutely. And it's tough, because in some instances we end up at odds with other industries. When you see advertisements for McDonald's and fast food — things people associate with feeling good — you don't want to be the side saying, again, we're like parents in that role a lot: "You really probably shouldn't eat that, that's not a great thing." A lot of prevention comes down to those kinds of choices. So I think there may be more opportunity for us as an industry — not just to identify what to do to prevent something, but also to provide incentives, maybe in conjunction with insurance companies and others, to help people get healthier in the first place.
MGR: Right — we have more technology now than ever to track how many steps we've taken, how our heart rate changes in real time, how we slept. All of that information can only better inform us for the future and help us make decisions. If we figure out the best way to package that with a soft reminder, or some type of gentle persuasion, there's so much possibility. That's truly one of the most exciting things about working in healthcare — we know it's going to change. There will always be new products, new indications, and something different to learn as we look at the next product, device, or therapy.
JM: As scientists in the industry, we've really come ahead of where we've been. If you look at treatments, we only get healthier — we treat things we never thought were treatable before, which is pretty amazing. The industry is one of change, uncertainty, and progress — and sometimes challenges with new diseases, as we saw with Covid, make it difficult to stay ahead. What would you advise our listeners to always stay focused on, as things and the industry change?
MGR: Try to be three steps ahead. This is today's issue — what could tomorrow's issue be? What could tomorrow's opportunity be? Being a strategic thinker and strategic partner is why we build longstanding relationships with clients — because that requires you to keep looking through the lens of the future, and not be afraid. As I said earlier, fear can be paralyzing, but if we keep asking questions — and I think this is the biggest piece of advice — don't be afraid to ask questions about everything you don't know. I tell everyone I work with: there's no such thing as too many questions. I'd rather you ask me a hundred questions and get it right than ask zero questions and get it wrong. In the world we're living in, the more we know, the better. So ask a ton of questions, and reserve the right to ask more later.
JM: Those are very wise words. Thank you, Melissa. This has been a great conversation.
MGR: My pleasure, John. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. And once again, congratulations on kicking this off. I'm incredibly excited to be a part of it, and now I'm excited for the future.
JM: We have a lot to look forward to. Thank you so much.
Links
- Melissa Gordon-Ring on LinkedIn
- Initiative / IPG Mediabrands Health
- IQVIA
- Symphony Health (an ICON plc company)
